Quotes About Childhood

AMMOS FYODOROVICH No, it's impossible to drive it out: he says his nanny hurt him as a child, and ever since then he's given off a whiff of vodka.

I was into opera as a kid - I'd play 'Carmen' and sing and dance. My mom signed me up for a theater group before preschool, and I never looked back.

I suppose I do complain sometimes. Who doesn't? We all know (or believe secretly) that when we were children we were happy and trusting and hopeful and good and that we would still be all these pleasant things if sometime, somewhere, somehow, we had not been betrayed.

being unable to initiate and maintain satisfying and enduring relationships; being unable to say no and stick to it; and other negative behaviors and attitudes with others as well as with the self-aborbed parent. Some try to work through their issues or concerns with mental health professionals, but find that it is just about impossible to adequately describe what their formative years were like.

imagination is a form of flagellation if a sensitive child lets it run wild ...

Not everything children experience has to be put on their level in order to do them good. Some things must be. But not everything.

Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.

crayon, drawing a

You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

languages. Rather, he gave himself entirely to the raising of Laura, a beautiful little girl who,

I had the pleasure, as Robin said, to live a childhood dream as many young Americans and Puerto Rican children live that play youth baseball. And I feel honored and very thankful for that opportunity.

When I was a child, my grandmother used to mix a paste for me of flour and water. Then I would go out into the yard and pick grass and make drawings out of pencil and grass pasted to the paper.

He also discovered that when he touched certain parts of the brain, he triggered long-lost childhood memories or dreamlike scenes—which implied that higher mental activities were also mapped in the brain.

While my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and--lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama--turn the dreary space around me into a stage for my wildest imaginings.

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

Je me rappelle encore avec quelle émotion le vieillard que j'étais à l'âge de neuf ans, de retour du camp, reçut au jour solennel de son anniversaire un recueil de contes roumains. En cet après-midi d'été 1945, dans le silence de la pièce, seul dans l'univers, je découvrais la langue fascinante, magnétique, miraculeuse, d'un conteur de génie. (p. 9)

Here, and everywhere, psychoanalysis must take the paradoxical position that the Child is Father to the Man; that Primal Father was once a boy, and, if there is anything to psychoanalysis, owes his disposition to his boyhood.

Our repressed desires are the desires we had, unrepressed, in childhood; and they are sexual desires

Consequently not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of one-self.… Not caution but rather a wise blindness.… Not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all shifting values.… This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence: namely the period of childhood.

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

Memory's distances, youth's wishes, childhood's dreams, the short joys of a whole long life and hopeless hopes come grey-clad, like evening mist after the sun has set.

A child had a right to be a child. Even in Mississippi a girl was a girl till her time came. White folks or no white folks. Nobody sent a little ol' thing out to take up for the whole damn race.