Quotes About Childhood

Emily did not want to believe in ghosts. But she kept seeing them. She had been seeing them ever since she could remember.

And we recall in Dickens' fiction how universal it is that a child looks after an adult, and how the adult remains so dependent upon the child that he becomes something worse than child-like.

Als das Kind Kind war, erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett und jetzt immer wieder, erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall

In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother's responses were automatic—it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn't want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune.

In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying…the child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginning, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.

You sucked it up in your mother's milk, that hate.

There was something in him that always stood apart, that she couldn't reach and he wouldn't offer. It wasn't just the Job and its demands, but something deeper: a central core of loneliness. He had been like that even as a child. An observer. Always on the outside, even when he played with others. As Annie said, it was a part of his nature, and he didn't think he could change it if he tried.

Either childhood is a lot more painful the second time around, or it's just less bearable. None of us are as strong or as brave as the children we used to be.

I am basically much more interested in what is happening inside the child than what the outside appearance is. I believe that forced conformity on the outside often heightens tensions on the inside. Originality should be allowed and even encouraged." p173 Roy Entwistle, 1973.

As a young child in Rome, he wrote out the entire score of a nine-voice religious work after hearing it twice.

When I was in second grade, my teacher, Miss Maxwell, read from The Harmony Herald that one in every four children lived in China. I remember looking over the room, guessing which children they might be. I wasn't sure where China was, but suspected it was on bus route three. I recall being grateful I didn't live in China because I didn't care for Chinese food and couldn't speak the language.

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood. What's dead in there still looks out. It's not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there's still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking;

Tears began to surge up into her eyes, and she found herself doubling up her fists, with the thumbs inside, as she had done as a child; she felt her jaw wobble, and when she spoke her voice could hardly be heard.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

It's a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, Momma, do we believe in winter?

The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order.

Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could reach one another in calm

Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he's hungry? I'm eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is see that deep chocolatey surface gleaming out at me from the refrigerator, and my life isn't my own.

Refusing! And she is after me with a broom, trying to sweep my rotten carcass into the open. Why, shades of Gregor Samsa! Hello Alex, goodbye Franz! You better tell me you're sorry, you, or else! And I don't mean maybe either! I am five, maybe six, and she is or-elsing me and not-meaning-maybe as though the firing squad is already outside, lining the street with newspaper preparatory to my execution.

Inhibition doesn't grow on trees, you know—takes patience, takes concentration, takes a dedicated and self-sacrificing parent and a hard-working attentive little child to create in only a few years' time a really constrained and tight-ass human being.

It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another's tears are more unbearable than one's own.