Quotes About Childhood

I used to have to hunt for hard-boiled eggs when I was a kid. What was the point of that? Was I supposed to be, 'Yay! I found them! Egg-salad sandwiches for everyone!' I was seven! I wanted chocolate, not bioavailable protein.

Anyone who grew up in a household where carob passed for chocolate and apple pies were actually filled with zucchini will feel me here.

Mine was the first generation of latchkey kids, referring to Generation Xers whose personal identity was, in part, shaped by the independence their working parents fostered when they left us alone after school.

When clans of yore went out for a meal in my day, there were no crayons, no sippy cups, no serving little Jennifer's unsauced spaghetti early. Generation X kids conducted themselves like tiny civilized sophisticates, because if we misbehaved, we'd enjoy a spanking for dessert instead of the triple-layer chocolate cake

Being six is the closest most of us will ever come to understanding what it's like to have a butler.

He refuses to sell his paintings and writes NOT FOR SALE on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a graffiti artist and primitive. They don't invent a childhood for white artists, he says.

Writing in 1957, Dr. Spock endorsed the process: "This is the way Nature expects human beings to learn child care—from their own childhood.

She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.

There are two kinds of houses in the neighborhood where I grew up-the ones where the parents stayed married, and the ones where they didn't.

drawing of a boy with brown hair and

Maybe when you first experience a place as a six-year-old, you become six again, every time you return.

The air smelled like the inside of the cabins at the summer camp in Maine: must from the off-season, wet wood and mold, bug spray and sunscreen, sunshine and sweaty kids. The essence of summertime.

On the best days, there'd be a new package of margarine, and Bethie would be allowed to break the capsule of yellow dye and squish it all around until all the margarine was yellow-colored.

There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth.

I had a tame rat when I was a boy, and I loved that animal as only a boy would love an old water-rat

Um auf das Faltblatt für Leberpillen zurückzukommen, so trafen die Symptome ohne jeden Zweifel auf mich zu, vor allem das der 'generellen Aversion gegen physische und mentale Anstrengungen'. Man kann sich gar nicht vorstellen, wie ich darunter leide. Schon in meiner frühesten Kindheit war ich damit geschlagen. (...) 'Los, du faules Stück, steh auf und mach dich nützlich', hieß es immer, und keiner ahnte, dass ich eigentlich krank war.

nu înc?pea îndoial? c? prezentam toate simptomele, cel mai important fiind totala lips? de poft? pentru orice fel de activitate. N-am cuvinte s? v? spun cât suf?r în aceast? privin??. Am fost un martir din cea mai fraged? copil?rie.

Dajte povpre?nemu otroku primerno priložnost, in ?e ne bo za?el delati ne?esa, ?esar ne bi smel, morate takoj poklicati zdravnika.

It is said that kids have no use for the word 'then'. It is said that only 'now' and 'this minute' count with kids. It is said that kids believe time began the day they were born. How sad if this were true. It would mean kids believe they live on a tiny, isolated island in time. It would mean that when they look back, they fail to see the fascinating human adventure that led up to that day when they were born. It would mean that when they look back, they see...nothing.

But thats okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball. And if you want to know what it was like back when Maniac Magee roamed these part, well, just run you're hand under your movie seat and be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts.

She had been utterly pleased with herself. "I runned away!" she chirped, and the sun was no match for her smile. And Zinkoff saw in that moment something that he had no words for. He saw that a kid runs to be found and jumps to be caught. That's what being a kid is: found, caught." (p. 185).

So he does what a kid has to do: He smells the cedar chest in his parents' bedroom, he decapitates dandelions, seesaws at the park, licks the mixing bowl, rides his bike, counts railroad cars, holds his breath, clucks his tongue, tastes tofu, touches moss, daydreams, looks back, looks ahead, wishes, wonders… and before he knows it, miraculously, the summer is over." (p. 163).

I saw a little girl in a wooden wagon, her dress spilling colors over its sides, staring at the rising sun as if it were the very dawn of creation.