Quotes About Childhood

I had seen buildings burn before, as part of my training and as part of my childhood. I had seen small homes and enormous mansions devoured by fire, and I had seen flames destroy factories and symphony halls and houses of worship. A school seems worse, I thought as the fire roared into the sky. Even when the school is empty, it's a terrible thing.

It was a sickness in my stomach and in my mouth and even in my heart. The symptoms were nervousness and dread. I don't know what the illness is called. I've had it since I was a child.

I still felt sick. It was a sickness in my stomach and in my mouth and even in my heart. The symptoms were nervousness and dread. I don't know what the illness is called. I've had it since I was a child.

It was a familiar feeling, to be hurrying someplace without really knowing what is going on. When I was a child, this happened all the time, because when you are a child, nothing is your business, and you are constantly being yanked one place or another with no satisfying explanation provided by the adults doing the yanking, and so you soon get used to being in a constant state of bewilderment.

Perhaps one night, when you were very small, someone tucked you into bed and read you a story called "The Little Engine That Could," and if so then you have my profound sympathies, as it is one of the most tedious stories on Earth. The story probably put you right to sleep, which is the reason it is read to children, so I will remind you that the story involves the engine of a train that for some reason has the ability to think and talk.

I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age 7, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. I was hooked.

I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up.

When you're eight years old, nothing is your business.

According to a British poll, you've only got a one in five chance of achieving your childhood career ambition. Which probably explains why you don't run into that many cowboys, princesses, or space rangers.

You don't remember the times your dad held your handle bars. You remember the day he let go.

We have to learn to remind the other parents who think we're being careless when we loosen our grip that we are actually trying to teach our children how to get along in the world, and that we believe this is our job. A child who can fend for himself is a lot safer than one forever coddled, because the coddled child will not have Mom or Dad around all the time, even though they act as if he will.

When a child is traumatized, something more discrete and more specific happens than a general loss of capacity for love and work. An ever-present, ever-draining abscess forms. The child goes on living an ordinary life. But if something touches the traumatic "abscess," the child hurts.

There seems to be little cultural difference in this. The face of horror in childhood is grave and relatively immobile. It may look dazed, but it rarely looks hysterical.

Everything depends on upbringing.

How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

What exactly were the duties of an imaginary friend? Pretty much just to make it easier for the child to fit into the world without feeling too alone or scared. Hours? Whatever it took. Benefits? The incredibly pure love between a kid and an imaginary friend. It didn't get better than that. Where did he fit in the great cosmic plan? Well, no one had ever told him.

MEET THE BOOGER EATER

Clearing the past was a precise process of becoming aware of our individual ways of controlling learned in childhood. And once we could transcend this habit, it said, we would find our higher selves, our evolutionary identities.

The First Insight is a reconsideration of the inherent mystery that surrounds our individual lives on this planet. We are experiencing these mysterious coincidences, and even though we don't understand them yet, we know they are real. We are sensing again, as in childhood, that there is another side of life that we have yet to discover, some other process operating behind the scenes.

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

Oosick, cootie shot! Give me a cootie shot!

We receive an e-mail from a mother who describes how her son, at age two, learned all the state capitals as an afternoon diversion and later solved three-digit arithmetic problems when he was bored in his stroller.

Jack's dad had started smoking during the war, so he'd grown up around the habit.