Quotes About Childhood

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator.

All children are born geniuses. The hard part is staying one once you grow up.

AidanIsAPoopyHead.

My mom and dad played this music all the time when I was growing up, so to me songs by Jerry Lee and Fats Domino are the classics, they're the best songs ever.

When I grew up, I only had two dreams. One was to be a cowboy and another was to be in the military. I grew up extremely patriotic and riding horses.

he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

The saddest thing is a little girl who is told by her own mother and father that she will never be pretty. And then they open the front door, and on the porch is a little white suitcase, with all of her things in it.

For me growing up, Christmas time was always the most fantastic, exciting time of year, and you'd stay up until three in the morning. You'd hear the parents wrapping in the other room but you knew that also, maybe, they were in collusion with Santa Claus.

Certain peer pressures encourage little fingers to learn how to hold a football instead of a crayon. Rumors circulate around the schoolyard: kids who draw or wear white socks and bring violins to school on Wednesdays might have cooties. I confess to having yielded to these pressures.

The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It's also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older.

As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.

We were all pagans once, before we went to school.

My mom put me in a Pampers commercial on TV.

At a really early age I connected with old soul and blues. My grandma used to take me to little record stores around Pittsburgh and buy me old records. I was 6, and I'd sing the songs at block parties. My grandma would get a kick out of hearing me do material that was far beyond my years. I was known around the neighborhood as the little girl with the big voice, and I always liked that contrast.

I was brought up in a household of chaos and I never felt stable at home.

I'm one of few children on the train who can read. Mam taught me all my letters years ago, in Ireland, then taught me how to spell. When we got to New York, she'd make me read to her, anything with words on it—crates and bottles I found in the street.

Actually, I did it because when we lived on Indian Island we had this turtle named Shelly.

EPIGRAPH "There was a very strange connection. One of those odd collisions that happen. We were a little alike; I was an unhealthy child that was kept at home. So there was an unsaid feeling between us that was wonderful, an utter naturalness. We'd sit for hours and not say a word, and then she'd say something, and I'd answer her. A reporter once asked her what we talked about. She said, 'Nothing foolish.'" —Andrew Wyeth

I feel myself retreating to someplace deep inside. It is a pitiful kind of childhood, to know that no one loves you or is taking care of you, to always be on the outside looking in.

It is a pitiful kind of childhood, to know that no one loves you or is taking care of you, to always be on the outside looking in.

other, better, memories: making fried eggs with her dad, turning them over with a large black plastic spatula. "Not so fast, Molly Molasses," he'd say. "Easy. Otherwise the eggs'll go splat.

Dominick and James, six-year-old twins, huddled together for warmth on a pallet on the floor.

father's drinking—did I mention that?