Quotes About Childhood

He'd awakened screaming himself hoarse and his mother had rushed in and pressed his face to her bosom and made the clowns go away. His father had flicked on the light switch and stood in the doorway, his fists clenched in impotent anger and unfulfilled rage. Tears had traced a path down his face.

Trying to convince himself that as a four-year-old boy he might have been something worth keeping.

Okay. Thomas. What was he like before his childhood incident?" Mr. Atlasia paused and cast the line of his memory back, disturbing still waters. Jade watched his face to see if he told everything that was dredged up.

Only in the campfire-stoked stories of Boy Scouts, bedtime tales baby-sitters employ to frighten bratty charges, or in the sweet delight of grandpas who never grew up, would the stories live on.

The children's happy cries rise and fall in the evening light as imperfect and irrevocable as the past, and he stands in the yard of his father's house, waiting, poised motionless on the frontier of the future, until it is too dark to see.

I was serious about ballet for a long time, but my mom got me into tap and jazz and modern and hip-hop, and I was one of those over-lessoned children.

We were the first latchkey-kid generation. Our parents believed in free love, and for many of us, that meant broken homes.

The idea of a personal God who protects us, loves us, and then punishes us by not allowing us into Heaven, but instead casts us into Hell for eternity if we haven't met his standards of living, is so outlandish that it can only be taught to children who don't know any better—which, by the way, is how it's done. If a person hasn't been introduced to this mythical idea about God in early childhood, he or she becomes increasingly hard to preach to.

Leurs regards se croisèrent et dans les yeux de son cadet il discerna ce qu'il avait déjà remarqué dans les yeux de certains patients: la tristesse de ceux qui n'ont jamais guéri de leur enfance.

Ansiábamos tu aprobación. Sorprende la psique infantil, en hambre permanente de afecto a pesar del maltrato.

Miriam Sacher had survived polio as a child. To Abraham, she was simply the most exquisite little bird who could not fly.

Normally my clients were my mother, my grandmother, and my dad, and I would sell them the issues with a great color cover. There was a story I remember called 'The Invader,' and it had an invisible dome covering a city, with a giant tentacled monster eating everybody in sight, and people trying to drill a hole in the dome. And I did these epic Prismacolor pencil illustrations and sold out the three issues to my captive audience.

And I really loved sculpting. My brother and I would do full human figures with clay and Plasticine—liver, intestines, the heart—fill them with ketchup and throw them from the roof. So I was an artistic but very morbid kid.

As a kid, I dreamed of having a house with secret passages and a room where it rained 24 hours a day

Since childhood, I've been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing.

Nada hay más delicado ni más temible que las manos de los chiquillos: en ellas el juguete no puede durar mucho.

In my imagination yes, I remember, when I was six years old, I was conducting all this concert in my house. But now it's real.

Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not being driven to succeed where their parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, or a somebody.

I was always a kid trying to make a buck. I borrowed a dollar from my dad, went to the penny candy store, bought a dollar's worth of candy, set up my booth, and sold candy for five cents apiece. Ate half my inventory, made $2.50, gave my dad back his dollar.

If his mother had lived it might have been different, but the farm in Asoli where Garin of Lower Corte had taken his three sons had been a dour, womanless place—acceptable perhaps for the twins, who had each other, and for the kind of man Garin had slowly become amid the almost featureless spaces of the flatlands, but no source of nurture or warm memories for a small, quick, imaginative youngest child, whose own gifts, whatever they might turn out to be, were not those of the land.

Inside every adult there's still a child that lingers. We're happiness merchants - giving people the opportunity to dream like children.

I was thinking that when I have children, that I should always dress as a character for them, so they think their mom is Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella.

Small Mabel whimpered all night long, For calling herself the cause. Her oak-eyed mother did no thing But change the bloody gauze.

It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates. And Mabbie was all of seven. And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar. And Mabbie thought life was heaven.