Quotes About Childhood

He strode with the weight of robbed innocence and a stolen childhood, for a life time of pain and anger, of terror and death. - Frank Balenger

Neither were we allowed to choose what we ate. I have a friend whose seven-year-old will only consider something if it's white. Had I tried that, my parents would have said, You're on, and served me a bowl of paste, followed by joint compound, and, maybe if I was good, some semen.

The houses looked like something a child might draw, a row of shaky squares with triangles on top. Add a door, add two windows. Think of putting a tree in the front yard, and then decide against it because branches aren't worth the trouble.

When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh's family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects.

In binghamton, new york, winter meant snow, and though I was young when we left, I was able to recall great heaps of it, and use that memory as evidence that North Carolina was, at best, a third-rate institution. What little snow there was would usually melt an hour or two after hitting the ground, and there you'd be in your windbreaker and unconvincing mittens, forming a lumpy figure made mostly of mud. Snow Negroes, we called them. The

They did not live in a child's house, we lived in theirs.

The rules were just different back then, especially in regard to corporal punishment. Not only could you hit your own children, but you could also hit other people's.

I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won't stop crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason.

Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you were old enough to work, and money was the only thing that mattered.

In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: "Shut up." That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child's house, we lived in theirs.

For a while, when I was eleven or so, I used to drop the empty cardboard toilet rolls into the john. They would take a while to disappear, five or six flushes usually, but I was in no hurry.

Pointing to the oversized crate that served as a manger, one particularly insufficient wise man proclaimed, "A child is bored." Yes, well, so was this adult.

Hey," he said, "that's where we used to go when we were a family.

When asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we hid the truth and listed who we wanted to sleep with when we grew up. "A policeman or a fireman or one of those guys who works with high-tension wires.

At around five, I took the L home. A woman near me had a three-year-old child on her lap, a girl, who looked at me and said, "Mommy, I hate that man.

When we went to the beach as children, on or about the fourth day, our father would say, Wouldn't it be nice to buy a cottage down here? We'd get our hopes up and then he would bring practical concerns into it... But still, we wanted one desperately. I told myself when I was young that one day I would buy a beach house and then it would be everyone's. As long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it.

Even in a jar, that kid has outearned me.

My dad was like the Marine Corps. Only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and called it a day. Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which frankly, I think is a little overrated.

May 9, 1989 Again this year I made Mom a Mother's Day card. It reads: M is for the Morbid things you showed me, O is for the Other things you did T is for the Thousand bucks you owe me H is for things you found I Hid E is for the Error of my caring R is for the Ranch house you call home Mother dear, I wish that you had shown me How to shave and how to use a comb.

Judy Nylon, who as a child had sought succour from her parents' escapist 'exotica' albums and regularly drifted off to sleep to the lulling vibraphones of Martin Denny's Quiet Village, recalls a slightly different version of events: 'So it was pouring rain in Leicester Square

Douglass's later, prolific appeals to the natural-rights tradition, and even to the right of revolution, should be first considered in light of these compelling, damaging childhood memories of such cruelty.

His mother was a reasonably nurturing person but did not protect and defend him from his father.

I stopped keeping an eye out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve because, when I was five, my mother told me that Santa was a wicked pervert who would cut off my peepee with a pair of scissors...if I didn't stop chattering about him, he would be certain to put me on his list and look me up. Christmas was never the same after that, but at least I still have my peepee.

Ich fand nirgendwo so viel Kindheit wie in der Deutschen Sprache. Schmatzen, schnaufen, schluchzen, schlürfen: Viele deutsche Wörter klingen wie Onomatopoesie. Für die Neugeborenen klingt vielleicht jede Sprache so wie Deutsch für mich.