Quotes About Childhood

Nothing in the world is like this- a bright white page with pale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencil the soft hush of it moving finally one day into letters.

For a long time, my mother's wasn't dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves - or worse, in the care of New York City Children's Services, where, my father said, there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn't happen. I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

That's why I don't buy it when people say children don't know. That they're too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life—crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can't tell me all of it's not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.

Every since he was a little boy, his father had always warned him about running in white neighborhoods. Once, when he was about ten, he had torn away from his father and taken off down Madison Avenue. When his father caught up to him, he grabbed Miah's shoulder. Don't you ever run in a white neighborhood, he'd whispered fiercely, tears in his eyes. Then he had pulled Miah toward him and held him. Ever.

How amazing these words are that slowly come to me. How wonderfully on and on they go. Will the words end, I ask whenever I remember to. Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now, and promising me infinity.

When you're young and your mother leaves, something inside of you fills up with the absence of her. I don't know how to explain. For a long time, there was this place inside of me where love for Marion should have been but wasn't.

In Tennessee, honeysuckle vines bloomed thick and full in our yard every summer. My brother and I ran out in the early hours, barefooted and still in pajamas to suck the sweetness from the bright flowers. It was never enough. That faint hint of honeysuckle on the tongue an almost broken promise of something better hidden somewhere deeper.

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.

You can't escape the taste of the food you had as a child. In times of stress, what do you dream about? Your mother's clam chowder. It's security, comfort. It brings you home.

It reminds me of those carefree days in elementary school," Adam said, taking a sop of milk. "Where the only thing you worried about was being first on the swings, or being picked last for kickball.

My mum is a school teacher and my dad is an electrician.

she talked in one of her memoirs of ignoring her little brother when she was supposed to be looking after him: "I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children...)

Da bambina facevo esattamente la stessa cosa: mi sdraiavo sul letto con i piedi al sole sul davanzale della finestra perché a quel tempo avevo sempre i piedi freddi. Poi mi mettevo a leggere un libro, e questa scena con me sdraiata che leggo un libro mandava mia madre su tutte le furie, certa com'era che fossi destinata a una vita di indolenza, quando invece ero solo destinata a scrivere libri che altri avrebbero letto (34).

Once, too, when he had said hello to some much older girls, one of them cried out in the strange, sticky voice he had heard grown women use, "Ooh, just look at the darlin little boy!" He had felt embarrassed but pleasantly flattered for a moment; then he heard several boys squealing the same words, but insincerely, in fact with a hatred and scorn which appalled him, and he had wished that he could not be seen.

Yes, for every child, rich or poor, there's a time of running through a dark place; and there's no word for a child's fear, and no ears to head it if there was a word, and no one to understand it if they heard. God save the little children! They abide and they endure.

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

The man of desire needs the promise of reward to urge him to action. He is as a child working for the possession of a toy.

Terminó la niñez y caí en el mundo.

Pobre de aquel, que no hizo de su infancia Una leyenda.

One day when I was like 9, I heard the Beatles on the radio, and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world, and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order, and I listened to them - and only them - until I was probably in high school.

Yesterday I asked a five-year-old child who Jesus was. You know what he replied? A statue.

Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.

As a child I understood how to give, I have forgotten this grace since I have become civilized. -

O menininho brinca no tapete enquanto nós adultos rimos contando coisas da infância do pai dele e dos tios. Ele ergue o rosto e indaga: — Do que vocês estão falando? — Da infância — responde alguém. — Infância é legal? — Muito. — A gente não pode viajar pra lá? Era o que estávamos fazendo