Quotes About Childhood

As cities get bigger, our best defence will be to prevent outbreaks in the first place by building better public health systems, improving childhood immunisation through better routine immunisation and pre-emptive vaccination campaigns.

Vaccines don't cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction.

When I was a child, there were not that many vaccines. I was vaccinated for polio. I actually got measles as a child. I got pertussis, whooping cough. I remember that very well.

Everybody who's a physician, who makes vaccines, who wants to find the cure for cancer. Everybody who wants to do any medical good for humankind got the passion for that before he or she was 10.

I was frustrated as a child when I had to use a vacuum. It had a screaming noise and the smell of stale dog and a lack of performance.

I grew up in a bit of a vacuum. And as a kid, you see 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' and you're like, 'Oh, it's a cartoon.' There's mixed media. It's funny, and there's stop-motion. But as an adult, you figure it out, how the entire underpinnings of their comedy was poking fun at the rank and file of the British aristocracy and the monarchy.

I was born in Africa but brought up in the north-east of England. Most of my childhood was spent living on a council estate that overlooked the Tyne and I went to the same junior school as Paul Gascoigne, of whom I have a vague memory.

We have vague memories of the Eighties. But we were still pre-Internet and pre-cell phone for most of our childhood.

I think the first team I ever played for was a YMCA team, probably around when I was seven years old. And really I have vague memories of it. I think, at that age, you're just trying to make sure the ball stays in bounds.

I've never liked my smile, you see. I should have had braces as a kid, but I was too proud and too vain. And I didn't want to be bullied at school.

This is my saddest story: In grade school, they would have us open our Valentine's cards and read them out loud. I always sent cards to myself because nobody else did.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

In 2nd grade, a girl who was a friend of mine gave me a homemade valentine. Like, a real, handwritten one!

I was sort of traumatized by girls in the third grade. Because there was a girl in my third grade class I had a crush on. I bought her a box of Valentine's Day chocolate. And I put it in her cubby with a note that said something like, 'I am deeply in love with you, Your Secret Admirer.' And I didn't sign my name.

The biggest place I look for validation is from my mother. That's the little girl in me that will never grow up.

Growing up on set, the director is the person that, as a child, you admire and gives you validation.

My real name is Elizabeth, but I had a nanny growing up who called me 'Elizabeanie.' So from 4 months old, my brothers were, like, 'Let's call her Beanie.' To show people the validity of it, I always say that if I met the president, I would say, 'Hi, my name is Beanie.'

I grew up Valley Stream until my parents moved to Florida when I was 20. I graduated from Valley Stream Central High School in 1985. It was the best childhood anyone could ever ask for.

UC Merced is the University of California's newest campus and lies among farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley, 2 1/2 hours east of San Francisco and not far from where I spent most of my childhood. It's a part of California that has suffered deeply from the recession with high unemployment and a skyrocketing home foreclosure rate.

As a kid in Fayetteville, N.C., I played golf all day, every day, a lot of it by myself. I spent hundreds of hours around the greens at Cape Fear Valley, the course my dad owned, hitting every shot I could think of - the one-hop-and-release, the chip that lands dead, the explosion from a bad lie.

I grew up in L.A. I actually grew up in the Valley, which was a pretty amazing place to grow up because everybody has nice, big backyards, and I was kind of a little nature being.

My world was small growing up. I never really left the three-mile radius of my tiny neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.

I moved to L.A. when I was, like, 6 months old. I was born in Georgia 'cause my dad was going to college at the University of Georgia for music. Then we moved to the Valley, and my dad was a songwriter out here.

When I was a kid, I had a friend who went on holiday to the same place every year and I never understood why. My ten-year-old eyes always wanted new things to look at - new branches of WH Smiths to look for Sweet Valley High books in, and different campsites or self-catering cottages to explore.