Quotes About Childhood

And even childhood was no good any more—not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity?

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live...

When you're a child you're the centre of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you're your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It's worse, but it's much better too.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.

The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.

I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent.

For some reason he remembered the Mexican name for carnations. Somebody must have told him when he was a kid. They were called Nails of Love ---and marigolds , the Nails of Death. It was a word lie nails---claveles. Maybe he'd better put marigolds on his mothers grave.

Every kid got a turtle some time or other. Nobody can't keep a turtle though. They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go--off somewheres. It's like me.

A frightened sorrow has closed down over my heart. I wish I were a child so I could cry. I'm too old to be afraid like this. And I've not felt such despair since a bird died in my hand by a flowing water long ago

It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent.

All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world appears, in our first years' experience of it! Slowly we realize that it is all disposable, including ourselves.

As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.

What's this about you being married?" "Well, I was. Still am." He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It's like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this—these trees, this pavement—was life, the real and only thing.

June The sun is rich And gladly pays In golden hours, Silver days, And long green weeks That never end. School's out. The time Is ours to spend. There's Little League, Hopscotch, the creek, And, after supper, Hide-and-seek. The live-long light Is like a dream, and freckles come Like flies to cream.

American dream: when he first heard the phrase as a kid he pictured God lying sleeping, the quilt-colored map of the U.S. coming out of his head like a cloud.

Like many youngsters they formed their own secret societies. The 'Potato Society

Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them - certain traits, certain places where you don't let the world go.

expect in many growed-up men you'd call sensible there's a little boy sleepin'—the little kid they onced was—that still keeps his fear of the dark.

Their silhouettes lingered in her mind. So did the sound of their kisses. She rose and went to the window and looked out over the busy playground. Children running, pulling, sliding, calling, spinning. If you traced all these children back to their beginnings, you came to kisses.

There was no arguing with a man's faith in the legends of his childhood.

What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?

I grew up in a very large family in a very small house. I never slept alone until after I was married.