child

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
9269f30	My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.	child children parents reading	Anne Fadiman
9da1f37	Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.	child faith parental-love parenthood parents	Richard Dawkins
ff6369e	If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.	child humor self	Emma Donoghue
ffd9c2c	Hello, inner child, I'm the inner babysitter!	child	Terry Pratchett
bf94e48	And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered.	breezes child dreaming poetry sunsets	Nicholas Sparks
d98ad3f	"My darling, you are indisposed! You must remain abed for the next eight months. Little Buford - " "I am NOT naming our child Buford..."	child clockwork-prince funny	Cassandra Clare
d77bdeb	I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.	child children	Anne Fadiman
418ee9a	I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.	child chilldhood read reading	Alberto Manguel
35c789c	"I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down."	child childhood encouragement memoir memories writers writing young	Anne Lamott
4a18ec9	This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.	child death job	Cormac McCarthy
3f1380c	We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.	melena mother pregnancy wicked child reality	Gregory Maguire
bb52ccc	"Miroku: Kagome, are you worrying about me?	bear child inuyasha kagome manga miroku my rumiko takahashi	Rumiko Takahashi
ea10441	Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.	child childhood children sleep	Stefan Zweig
e767685	Natalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents' names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it's the only way to truly keep your child. Kid grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.	child family	Gillian Flynn
d3e03ff	I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.	child childhood ender love	Orson Scott Card
eb769bf	How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.	child childhood grownup tolstoy youth	Leo Tolstoy
193234a	When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.	child jeanette-winterson pregnancy sexing-the-cherry woman	Jeanette Winterson
918281b	"...Ty grabbed my phone and threatened to tell Otter that I liked being spanked during sex. This proceeded to lead up on a long tangent where I had to have him explain to me how he knows about stuff like people getting spanked during sex. He said he might have heard it mentioned while watching MSNBC. I told him he was grounded from watching the news channels for a week. That's where this whole sidebar should have ended, but then I was forced to explain S & M and bondage to my little brother, who was persistent on the topic, and who kept staring at me with mounting horror when I finally /did/ explain, and I realized I had maybe gone too far, and we had to spend the next five minutes swearing to God that I had never nor would I ever attempt to do anything like that. He might now be the only nine-year-old who has heard the terms "cock ring" and "fisting". My parenting skills are unparalleled."	child funny m-m parenting romance	T.J. Klune
aac8a24	I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn't be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike. I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn't feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror's reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. 'Who are you?' I'd ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn't me. I'd watch my lips moving and say it again, 'Who are you?	amnesia change child dissociated-state dissociation dissociative dissociative-identity-disorder dream-like dreaming emotion emotionals identity identity-alternation identity-confusion identity-crisis identity-switch impostor incest lookalike memory-loss mental-health mirror multiple-personality-disorder personality-switch sexual-abuse split-personality survivor trauma trigger triggered unreal unreality	Alice Jamieson
5854480	I was only twelve. But I knew how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that was no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long Autumn days of the years past when I carried her books home from school.	beach child education fall forever love morals october school	Ray Bradbury
b09fede	Never tell a child that something it's too hard	advice-for-women child children hard influence never tell too-hard	Mitch Albom
eee48ed	"I realized that I'm a child." William looked point-blank at her chest. "No."	cerise child ilona-andrews the-edge william	Ilona Andrews
d9c35b2	Go on, glare your eyes at me, and cry and plead, and talk to me about money and what it can buy. But it can't buy back a child once he's dead!	baby buy child children cry crying dead death eyes glare glares glaring kid kids life money-monetary plead pleading talk talking young young-adults youth	V.C. Andrews
399aa36	"What is it?" "A prayer." "For a child?" She nodded. "For me?" Another nod. "On a tree?" "Trees spend all day looking up at God."	child dialogue god prayer tree wish	Mitch Albom
7431128	"You are an intriguing combination, half child, half seductress, half angel." I laughed sort and bitterly. "That's what all men like to think about women. Little girls they have to take care of--when I know for a fact it is the male who is more boy than man."	child feminist girl innocence lmao man woman	V.C. Andrews
d0e11c8	When you're a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you're left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you're just the same as everybody else.	child	Michael Marshall Smith
e5d97e9	Look at you, standing there in your iron- gray dress, feeling pious and self- righteous while you starve small children!	baby child children dresses gray kid kids pious righteous self-righteous standing	V.C. Andrews
39f3929	Lords of blue and Lords of gold, Lords of wind and waters wild, Lords of time that's growing old, When will come the season mild? When will come blue Madoc's child?	child gold old-growing season water	Madeleine L'Engle
09cfaa4	He's completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly.	child childhood cigarette growing-up kid memory nostalgia smoke wasted-time young	Rebecca McNutt
5ff2afb	And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.	child consciousness love	Vladimir Nabokov
4e229ca	So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l never sing, but this stuff was just atrocious. For example: I love you You love me Thank God for that I'm so happy And Ty's personal favorite (which he helped me on): Otter! Otter! Otter! Don't lead cows to slaughter I love you and I know I should've told you soon-a But you didn't buy the dolphin-safe tuna! TY asked me if I got the hidden message in his poem. I told him it was loud and clear.	animal-rights child funny gay romance	T.J. Klune
45350e3	"You don't understand!" she exclaimed bitterly. "That," said his lordship, with a touch of acidity, "is a foolish accusation which lacks even the saving grace of originality! Every generation, my child, has said, or thought, that the preceding one was devoid of understanding or experience."	child foolish generation old understand	Georgette Heyer
d68f92a	When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.	child father fish grecian-urn keats mermaid	Russell Hoban
786d6fc	...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.	child klosterman lazy-eye	Chuck Klosterman
83f8ca7	She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public was a beloved child. She'd parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people on the sidewalks. When we got home, she'd trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door, and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I had done to displease her. I have one memory that catches in me like a nasty clump of blood. Marian was dead about two years, and my mother had a cluster of friends come over for afternoon drinks. For hours, the child was cooed over, smothered with red lipstick kisses, tidied up with tissues, then lipstick smacked again. I was suppose to be reading in my room, but I sat at the top of the stairs watching. My mother finally was handed the baby, and she cuddled it ferociously. Oh, how, wonderful it is to hold a baby again! Adora jiggled it on her knee, walked it around the rooms, whispered to it, and I looked down from above like a spiteful little god, the back of my hand placed against my face, imagining how it felt to be cheek to cheek with my mother.	child childhood-memory dysfunctional-mother human-accessory jealousy loneliness mother	Gillian Flynn
c03a790	Then turn your eyes back on me, and tell me that Cathy and I are still children to be treated with condescension, and are incapable of understanding adult subjects.	adults child children condescension eyes incapable kid kids subjects teens told treated understand understanding young-adults	V.C. Andrews
96a4aea	It was a child's awareness, never spoken or even fully acknowledged, but deeply felt.	child	Donna Woolfolk Cross
eb25f50	She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.	beauty child child-s-mind grown-up grown-ups imperative ursula-monkton	Neil Gaiman
5058335	There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal.	child children danger demand equal kid little much require risk show teach young youth	Robin Hobb
475d6fa	Being loud after drinking wine doesn't help. Being silent after drinking wine doesn't help. Nothing really ever gets solved either way.	alcoholism-addiction-recovery arguing child drunk dysfunction fighting mental-illness violence wine	Mariel Hemingway
311cc4d	They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids' adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment... She'd been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn't her favor-ite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn't she just read the fucking thing with gusto and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her adult judgment and professional story opinions to a book her kid loved? Of course the child hero should always triumph! Who wanted a kids' book to feel like real life? Real life was fucking intolerable.	child childhood hero judgment kid life reading	Maile Meloy

9269f30

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

child children parents reading

Anne Fadiman

9da1f37

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

child faith parental-love parenthood parents

Richard Dawkins

ff6369e

If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.

child humor self

Emma Donoghue

ffd9c2c

Hello, inner child, I'm the inner babysitter!

child

Terry Pratchett

bf94e48

And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered.

breezes child dreaming poetry sunsets

Nicholas Sparks

d98ad3f

"My darling, you are indisposed! You must remain abed for the next eight months. Little Buford - " "I am NOT naming our child Buford..."

child clockwork-prince funny

Cassandra Clare

d77bdeb

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

child children

Anne Fadiman

418ee9a

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.

child chilldhood read reading

Alberto Manguel

35c789c

"I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down."

child childhood encouragement memoir memories writers writing young

Anne Lamott

4a18ec9

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

child death job

Cormac McCarthy

3f1380c

We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

melena mother pregnancy wicked child reality

Gregory Maguire

bb52ccc

"Miroku: Kagome, are you worrying about me?

bear child inuyasha kagome manga miroku my rumiko takahashi

Rumiko Takahashi

ea10441

Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.

child childhood children sleep

Stefan Zweig

e767685

Natalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents' names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it's the only way to truly keep your child. Kid grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.

child family

Gillian Flynn

d3e03ff

I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

child childhood ender love

Orson Scott Card

eb769bf

How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

child childhood grownup tolstoy youth

Leo Tolstoy

193234a

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.

child jeanette-winterson pregnancy sexing-the-cherry woman

Jeanette Winterson

918281b

"...Ty grabbed my phone and threatened to tell Otter that I liked being spanked during sex. This proceeded to lead up on a long tangent where I had to have him explain to me how he knows about stuff like people getting spanked during sex. He said he might have heard it mentioned while watching MSNBC. I told him he was grounded from watching the news channels for a week. That's where this whole sidebar should have ended, but then I was forced to explain S & M and bondage to my little brother, who was persistent on the topic, and who kept staring at me with mounting horror when I finally /did/ explain, and I realized I had maybe gone too far, and we had to spend the next five minutes swearing to God that I had never nor would I ever attempt to do anything like that. He might now be the only nine-year-old who has heard the terms "cock ring" and "fisting". My parenting skills are unparalleled."

child funny m-m parenting romance

T.J. Klune

aac8a24

I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn't be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike. I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn't feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror's reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. 'Who are you?' I'd ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn't me. I'd watch my lips moving and say it again, 'Who are you?

amnesia change child dissociated-state dissociation dissociative dissociative-identity-disorder dream-like dreaming emotion emotionals identity identity-alternation identity-confusion identity-crisis identity-switch impostor incest lookalike memory-loss mental-health mirror multiple-personality-disorder personality-switch sexual-abuse split-personality survivor trauma trigger triggered unreal unreality

Alice Jamieson

5854480

I was only twelve. But I knew how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that was no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long Autumn days of the years past when I carried her books home from school.

beach child education fall forever love morals october school

Ray Bradbury

b09fede

Never tell a child that something it's too hard

advice-for-women child children hard influence never tell too-hard

Mitch Albom

eee48ed

"I realized that I'm a child." William looked point-blank at her chest. "No."

cerise child ilona-andrews the-edge william

Ilona Andrews

d9c35b2

Go on, glare your eyes at me, and cry and plead, and talk to me about money and what it can buy. But it can't buy back a child once he's dead!

baby buy child children cry crying dead death eyes glare glares glaring kid kids life money-monetary plead pleading talk talking young young-adults youth

V.C. Andrews

399aa36

"What is it?" "A prayer." "For a child?" She nodded. "For me?" Another nod. "On a tree?" "Trees spend all day looking up at God."

child dialogue god prayer tree wish

Mitch Albom

7431128

"You are an intriguing combination, half child, half seductress, half angel." I laughed sort and bitterly. "That's what all men like to think about women. Little girls they have to take care of--when I know for a fact it is the male who is more boy than man."

child feminist girl innocence lmao man woman

V.C. Andrews

d0e11c8

When you're a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you're left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you're just the same as everybody else.

child

Michael Marshall Smith

e5d97e9

Look at you, standing there in your iron- gray dress, feeling pious and self- righteous while you starve small children!

baby child children dresses gray kid kids pious righteous self-righteous standing

V.C. Andrews

39f3929

Lords of blue and Lords of gold, Lords of wind and waters wild, Lords of time that's growing old, When will come the season mild? When will come blue Madoc's child?

child gold old-growing season water

Madeleine L'Engle

09cfaa4

He's completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly.

child childhood cigarette growing-up kid memory nostalgia smoke wasted-time young

Rebecca McNutt

5ff2afb

And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.

child consciousness love

Vladimir Nabokov

4e229ca

So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l never sing, but this stuff was just atrocious. For example: I love you You love me Thank God for that I'm so happy And Ty's personal favorite (which he helped me on): Otter! Otter! Otter! Don't lead cows to slaughter I love you and I know I should've told you soon-a But you didn't buy the dolphin-safe tuna! TY asked me if I got the hidden message in his poem. I told him it was loud and clear.

animal-rights child funny gay romance

T.J. Klune

45350e3

"You don't understand!" she exclaimed bitterly. "That," said his lordship, with a touch of acidity, "is a foolish accusation which lacks even the saving grace of originality! Every generation, my child, has said, or thought, that the preceding one was devoid of understanding or experience."

child foolish generation old understand

Georgette Heyer

d68f92a

When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.

child father fish grecian-urn keats mermaid

Russell Hoban

786d6fc

...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

child klosterman lazy-eye

Chuck Klosterman

83f8ca7

She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public was a beloved child. She'd parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people on the sidewalks. When we got home, she'd trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door, and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I had done to displease her. I have one memory that catches in me like a nasty clump of blood. Marian was dead about two years, and my mother had a cluster of friends come over for afternoon drinks. For hours, the child was cooed over, smothered with red lipstick kisses, tidied up with tissues, then lipstick smacked again. I was suppose to be reading in my room, but I sat at the top of the stairs watching. My mother finally was handed the baby, and she cuddled it ferociously. Oh, how, wonderful it is to hold a baby again! Adora jiggled it on her knee, walked it around the rooms, whispered to it, and I looked down from above like a spiteful little god, the back of my hand placed against my face, imagining how it felt to be cheek to cheek with my mother.

child childhood-memory dysfunctional-mother human-accessory jealousy loneliness mother

Gillian Flynn

c03a790

Then turn your eyes back on me, and tell me that Cathy and I are still children to be treated with condescension, and are incapable of understanding adult subjects.

adults child children condescension eyes incapable kid kids subjects teens told treated understand understanding young-adults

V.C. Andrews

96a4aea

It was a child's awareness, never spoken or even fully acknowledged, but deeply felt.

child

Donna Woolfolk Cross

eb25f50

She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.

beauty child child-s-mind grown-up grown-ups imperative ursula-monkton

Neil Gaiman

5058335

There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal.

child children danger demand equal kid little much require risk show teach young youth

Robin Hobb

475d6fa

Being loud after drinking wine doesn't help. Being silent after drinking wine doesn't help. Nothing really ever gets solved either way.

alcoholism-addiction-recovery arguing child drunk dysfunction fighting mental-illness violence wine

Mariel Hemingway

311cc4d

They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids' adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment... She'd been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn't her favor-ite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn't she just read the fucking thing with gusto and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her adult judgment and professional story opinions to a book her kid loved? Of course the child hero should always triumph! Who wanted a kids' book to feel like real life? Real life was fucking intolerable.

child childhood hero judgment kid life reading

Maile Meloy