Quotes About Childhood

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.

We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.

It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all the vital ways, without sex itself—and isn't that one useful definition of a happy girlhood? I didn't know or appreciate this aspect of my luck until well into adulthood, when I began to find, in more cases than I would have guessed, that among my women friends, irrespective of background, their own childhood sex seasons had been exploited and destroyed by the misdeeds of uncles and fathers, cousins, friends, strangers.

What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. Oh

It was like tag, but a girl was never "It," only boys were "It," girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as "natural" or "inevitable"—as so many other people seem to do—and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.

I wrote an article for The Women's Earth recently. I described a school I worked in where I gave all the children a potted spider plant and told them to look after it for a week like a daddy or mommy looks after a baby. Each child chose which parent they were going to emulate. This lovely little Jamaican boy, Winston, chose his daddy. The next week his mother phoned and asked why I'd asked Winston to feed his plant Pepsi and put it in front of the television.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as 'natural' or 'inevitable' – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages.

When I was a kid, I thought I'd rather be a brain in a jar than a "natural woman." I have turned out to be some odd combination of both, from moment to moment, and with no control over when and where or why those moments occur.

My childhood took place in the widening gap.

I was completely unreachable, for the first time in years. It gave me an unexpected but not unpleasant sense of stillness, of being outside of time: it reminded me somehow of childhood.

There was a sense in which she couldn't quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew—from Lambert only—that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it "that nonsense," or sometimes "those ridiculous people," because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her.

Viena iš vaikyst?s apgauli? yra tai, jog neb?tina suprasti, kad pajustum. Kai protas pradeda suvokti, kas vyksta, žaizdos širdyje jau b?na gana gilios.

Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play.

In this chapter, what do you find out about Janie's parents and early childhood? CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.1

Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn't know Ah wuzn't white till Ah was round six years old.

I think it's important to remember where I began. I know that when I talk to other writers, say, writers from the South or writers from abroad, it's where they begin as children that is important to them.

I look back on how I was as a child, I had a wonderful mom and an absent father, but I still had a great childhood.

I didn't learn stories, I just absorbed them.

Child poverty is more than an abstract problem to me. It's something I know all too much about.

I was an abused kid.

When I was a kid, it was very common to go places and get racially abused, starting from age six all the way up until you got into the first team.

At home, our focus has always been academics and playing.

I wish we could get back to those days, just let kids go and play and enjoy themselves on the streets instead of at academies too young.