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0812cc5 I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway... let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves. childhood children fatherhood growing-up inspirational inspirational-life inspirational-quotes inspiring kids life life-and-living living motherhood parenthood parenting parenting-children C. JoyBell C.
ad93431 Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul. abuse carefree child-abuse childhood nightmares soul Dave Pelzer
d8034bc "Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." breaking-down-assignment childhood encouragement homework project project-management school time time-management writing writing-advice Anne Lamott
22f78a9 "Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on." advice childhood getting-started incest memoir memories memory remembering writing Anne Lamott
070cb0c When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you bridge childhood Gail Carson Levine
f7a2c1b What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. childhood motherhood projection psychology Margaret Atwood
6886bc6 It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood childhood inspirational love mister-rogers-neighborhood television Fred Rogers
7c09993 "Would it be possible for me to see something from up there?" asked Milo politely. "You could," said Alec, "but only if you try very hard to look at things as an adult does." Milo tried as hard as he could, and, as he did, his feet floated slowly off the ground until he was standing in the air next to Alex Bings. He looked around very quickly and, an instant later, crashed back down to the earth again. "Interesting, wasn't it?" asked Alex. "Yes, it was," agreed Milo, rubbing his head and dusting himself off, "but I think I'll continue to see things as a child. It's not so far to fall." childhood perspective Norton Juster
55ef4bb Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up bill childhood grownups horror it pennywise stephen-king Stephen King
cf706a7 Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives broken-hearts bullying childhood childhood-trauma crying cutting-your-self depression emo emotion growing-up happiness helplessness hopeless-romantic infatuation inspirational joy lfe-essons life love parents phases romance sorrow teenage-love teenagers trapped Thisuri Wanniarachchi
ee4762a I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations. childhood children-s-books illustrated-books Neil Gaiman
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
50dc823 For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief--how could they ever be other than what they are? childhood innocence nostalgia time time-passing Ian McEwan
3957452 I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm. childhood enthusiasm tears Paulo Coelho
a77ab7e ...my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room ... I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun. abusive abusive-parents anger broken-home childhood childhood-memories communication divorce emotional-abuse family father fight fighting fights fury heartbreak heartbroken love love-lost malice mental-abuse mother parenthood parents parents-and-children rage scared sexism silence terror Gillian Flynn
2c86a35 There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere. childhood future Graham Greene
278946c It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow. childhood descriptions friend friends friendship running shadows together Ray Bradbury
345669d Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors--the living--could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs--those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact--had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you your life? causes childhood christian-martyrs christianity comrades conscription death fanaticism friends kamikaze martyrdom martyrs masochism memorials november orwell patriotism poppies principles religion sacrifice self-abnegation self-importance soldiers suicide suicide-attack theocracy torture ugliness war Christopher Hitchens
e657a8a This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal. childhood education growing-up high-school life work Ryū Murakami
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
b23d0b7 "I know," said Peter. "Perhaps better than anyone. But you can't stay a child forever. To choose to speak into Echo's Well is to choose illusion. To choose to avoid the responsibilities of being an adult. The real trick--the real choice--is to keep the best of the child you were, without forgetting when you grow up. "It is the best of both worlds, Jack. Being a child is to believe in magic everywhere... "...but even Peter Pan had to grow up one day." childhood inspirational jack life peter-pan James A. Owen
9878ddf "Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. People are much more complicated than that. It's true of everybody.' I said, 'Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?' Lettie threw a pebble into the pond. 'I don't think so,' she said. 'Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.' I said, 'People should be scared of Ursula Monkton.' 'P'raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?' 'Dunno. Why do you think she's scared of anything? She's a grown-up, isn't she? Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of things.' Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters. And as for grown-ups...' She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, 'I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." adults age childhood children fantasy fear inside monsters outside scared truth Neil Gaiman
89e6722 "Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn't trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he'd been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill. I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class... "Stories aren't real," he told me shortly. "They don't feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding 'family' in the nearest gang." Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. "Write down the names of some books," she said. "Maybe we'll read them." I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint - for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young lives. Stories that use the power of myth to speak truth to the human heart. creates a magical world that's not off in a distant Neverland but here and now and accessible, formed by the "magic" of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I've long lost count of the number of times I've heard people from say that books by Charles saved them in their youth, and kept them going. Recently I saw that parole officer again, and I asked after his work. "Gets harder every year," he said. "Or maybe I'm just getting old." He stopped me as I turned to go. "That writer? That Charles de Lint? My wife got me to read them books.... Sometimes I pass them to the kids." "Do they like them?" I asked him curiously. "If I can get them to read, they do. I tell them: charles-de-lint childhood fantasy folklore magical-realism myth mythic-fiction power-of-stories troubled-backgrounds urban-fantasy Terri Windling
49561d8 It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks. childhood memories moon nature south-carolina sun sunset twilight Pat Conroy
6c55c5e Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood. beauty bless childhood llano me mystery river rudolfo ultima Rudolfo Anaya
be78cca Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one. childhood coming-of-age Khaled Hosseini
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
4d712f0 When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing. babies childhood children family family-relationships motherhood mothering mothers Rebecca Solnit
97f44f6 I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were entirely transactional: 'We're out of milk again.' (I'll get some today.) 'I need this ironed properly.' (I'll do that today.) 'How hard is it to buy milk?' (Silence.) 'You forgot to call the plumber.' (Sigh.) 'Goddammit, put on your coat, right now, and go out and get some goddamn milk. Now.' These messages and orders brought to you by my father, a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. abusive abusive-relationship abusive-relationships bad-parenting broken-home childhood childhood-memories communication depression divorce family father fight fighting fights heartbreak love love-lost mother parenthood parents parents-and-children relationship sexism silence Gillian Flynn
a44954e The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedf ellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be. childhood reason Richard Dawkins
4d82a60 THE LILIES This morning it was, on the pavement, When that smell hit me again And set the houses reeling. People passed like rain: (The way rain moves and advances over the hills) And it was hot, hot and dank, The smell like animals, strong, but sweet too. What was it? Something I had forgotten. I tried to remember, standing there, Sniffing the air on the pavement. Somehow I thought of flowers. Flowers! That bad smell! I looked: down lanes, past houses-- There, behind a hoarding, A rubbish-heap, soft and wet and rotten. Then I remembered: After the rain, on the farm, The vlei that was dry and paler than a stone Suddenly turned wet and green and warm. The green was a clash of music. Dry Africa became a swamp And swamp-birds with long beaks Went humming and flashing over the reeds And cicadas shrilling like a train. I took off my clothes and waded into the water. Under my feet first grass, then mud, Then all squelch and water to my waist. A faint iridescence of decay, The heat swimming over the creeks Where the lilies grew that I wanted: Great lilies, white, with pink streaks That stood to their necks in the water. Armfuls I gathered, working there all day. With the green scum closing round my waist, The little frogs about my legs, And jelly-trails of frog-spawn round the stems. Once I saw a snake, drowsing on a stone, Letting his coils trail into the water. I expect he was glad of rain too After nine moinths of being dry as bark. I don't know why I picked those lilies, Piling them on the grass in heaps, For after an hour they blackened, stank. When I left at dark, Red and sore and stupid from the heat, Happy as if I'd built a town, All over the grass were rank Soft, decaying heaps of lilies And the flies over them like black flies on meat... childhood flowers nature Doris Lessing
c4dcbf1 There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. childhood development parenthood Pat Conroy
3f8798d What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think--the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn't known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie's rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn't a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being--whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars. childhood gratitude joy knowledge memoir wonder Annie Dillard
753e005 We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze. childhood grass verges Roddy Doyle
dfaff56 "Look at me!" he would shout as he ran laughing through the halls of Storm's End. "Look at me, I'm a dragon," or "Look at me, I'm a wizard," or "Look at me, look at me, I'm the rain god." The bold little boy with wild black hair and laughing eyes was a man grown now, one-and-twenty, and still he played his games. Cressen thought sadly." a-song-of-ice-and-fire asoiaf childhood fantasy game-of-thrones games george-r-r-martin got kings renly-baratheon George R.R. Martin
9cca028 In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you. beath burden childhood decision dying future imagination present suicide teenager young-adult youth Rebecca Solnit
bf49641 You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again. art childhood love Michael Marshall Smith
538d1a9 It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young. No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood. childhood good life live responsibility small young Orson Scott Card
e17e3bb It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly. boyhood childhood face smile tolstoy youth Leo Tolstoy
2760998 In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own experience. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same. childhood Maxim Gorky
005153d Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science. childhood growing-up maturity reason Richard Dawkins
890b226 `ndm yhbT llyl , yurj` m`h kl lmkhwf lmkhtby'@ fy Hny 'nfsn mndh lTfwl@ childhood night novel Paulo Coelho
930afe5 It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn't it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn't playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules. childhood children fantasies fantastic fantasy game games playing playing-games pretend pretending reality Francesca Lia Block
9e20b12 what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life? childhood innocence love Leo Tolstoy
2fea0d0 So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. childhood coming-of-age earthsea Ursula K. Le Guin
8655986 Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, and supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill. benign-neglect childhood curiosity imagination parenting Annie Dillard
efe1690 They thought more before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, 'Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.' And when I tried to laugh it off and said, well, I didn't like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth touched Rand's arm: 'Because of the divorce. All those comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those are just bad memories for Nick.' It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don't like cherries. broken-home cherry-pie childhood childhood-memories divorce funny iconoclast ironic irony logic memories over-thinking patriotism psychologist psychology simplicity symbolism the-mind thoughts Gillian Flynn
85d3504 When you're a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else. childhood wanderlust John Scalzi
b173ac1 How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy? childhood ocean remembering Philip Roth
b7a7090 Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues -- innocent joy and the boundless desire for love -- were the only motives in life? childhood youth Leo Tolstoy
16c281c "One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths "for your own good." Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible..." childhood growing-up life Robin Wasserman
5e86fa8 ...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult. childhood effort stress Joan Didion
a2bd562 Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me. childhood death funeral grief self-love sorrow tolstoy unhappiness youth Leo Tolstoy
772c39c As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea. animals childhood earthsea wisdom Ursula K. Le Guin
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
a07e5c7 You see, here's my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there. childhood father-s-love kids-being-kids Mitch Albom
8b1c54f "Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'" Rose chuckled. "But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out." childhood kids pain parents work-things-out Mitch Albom
acc1f32 Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-a-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late. childhood relentlessness Samuel Beckett
3db89af Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she'd be out on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood. childhood children ice-cream kids nostalgia pollution rainbow-sorbet sea Rebecca McNutt
7a08e1a "I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." ... I wonderes if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations." childhood Neil Gaiman
631383d Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: , surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way. I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again. childhood consciousness self Annie Dillard
6800204 Yes, it was real hatred - not the hatred we only read about in novels, which I do not believe in, hatred that is supposed to find satisfaction in doing some one harm - but the hatred that fills you with overpowering aversion for a person who, however, deserves your respect, yet whose hair, his neck, the way he walks, the sound of his voice, his whole person, his every gesture are repulsive to you, and at the same time some unaccountable force draws you to him and compels you to follow his slightest acts with uneasy attention. childhood tolstoy youth Leo Tolstoy
9636d57 Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real. childhood disillusionment illusions lynda-barry Lynda Barry
10054a5 "I've just been thinking it would be a lot of fun to live in a defunct shopping mall! Totally abandoned, Yet still frozen in time, Bright white lights shining, Artificial turquoise fountains spewing out clear water, Eerie eighties elevator music drifting by... Dancing erratically, shouting to the top, Because it's sad to see these places die. They're a testament to the hubris of modern America, which is dying in and of itself. Let's face it. We know we can't compete with Online shopping And Made-in-China products And eBay And Amazon. Those of us who spent our High school And college days Being wage slaves to these dying malls, We'll be old and nostalgic someday, Telling our grandkids about these wonderful buildings! They housed sets of trendy clothes Which nobody was rich enough to afford Or thin enough to fit in. We'll tell them about the first time We were almost trampled in a Black Friday stampede. The first time we saw a kid Vomit in the ugly rainbow ball pit At the children's play area, Dumped by babysitters to grow up there, Spending their childhood draped in neon. The first time eating greasy pad-thai And hamburgers At the food court. The first time falling in love In the dark movie theatre That charges too much for stale popcorn. Holding hands in the sunlit rays Of the dusty projector... Totally lost in moments. What is the meaning of this voyage? Our grandkids, Who will probably have Smartphones Surgically implanted to their brains And identical glass condominiums by then, They'll gasp in shock and say, "Wow, that sounds SO cool!" childhood consumerism dead-mall eerie life love mall nostalgia shopping Rebecca McNutt
3d892a5 Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst. childhood jog-your-memory memories nostalgia Alice Munro
419c4e8 She tried so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all. childhood growing-up maturity George R.R. Martin
5d1030a A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life--the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives--as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers. childhood history memory Annie Dillard
c5810f9 Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks. childhood futility lost-innocence lost-youth rabbit-angstrom sense-memory John Updike
2a8aea9 5-4-10 Tuesday 8:00 A.M. Made a large batch of chili and spaghetti to freeze yesterday. And some walnut fudge! Relieved the electricity is still on. It's another beautiful sunny day with fluffy white clouds drifting by. The last cloud bank looked like a dog with nursing pups. I open the window and let in some fresh air filled with the scent of apple and plum blossoms and flowering lilacs. Feels like it's close to 70 degrees. There's a boy on a skate board being pulled along by his St. Bernard, who keeps turning around to see if his young friend is still on board. I'm thinking of a scene still vividly displayed in my memory. I was nine years old. I cut through the country club on my way home from school and followed a narrow stream, sucking on a jawbreaker from Ben Franklins, and I had some cherry and strawberry pixie straws, and banana and vanilla taffy inside my coat pocket. The temperature was in the fifties so it almost felt like spring. There were still large patches of snow on the fairways in the shadows and the ground was soggy from the melt off. Enthralled with the multi-layers of ice, thin sheets and tiny ice sickles gleaming under the afternoon sun, dripping, streaming into the pristine water below, running over the ribbons of green grass, forming miniature rapids and gently flowing rippling waves and all the reflections of a crystal cathedral, merging with the hidden world of a child. Seemingly endless natural sculptures. Then the hollow percussion sounds of the ice thudding, crackling under my feet, breaking off little ice flows carried away into a snow-covered cavern and out the other side of the tunnel. And I followed it all the way to bridge under Maple Road as if I didn't have a care in the world. childhood human-interest imagination natural-wonders Andrew Neff
8fe8366 Three children lay on the rocks at the water's edge. A dark-haired girl, two boys, slightly older. This image is caught forever in my memory, like some fragile creature preserved in amber. childhood fragile memories nostalgia preserved quote quotes Juliet Marillier
abc4d93 Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood. brains childhood children children-s-books children-s-lit children-s-literature development experiences life life-experiences literature reading E.L. Konigsburg
1219e5c Todo nino es un artista que canta, baila, pinta, cuenta historias y construye castillos. Los grandes artistas son personas extranas que han logrado preservar en el fondo de su alma esa candidez sagrada de la ninez y de los hombres que llamamos primitivos, y por eso provocan la risa de los estupidos. childhood inspirational Ernesto Sabato
253b9d8 Is it only in childhood that we are capable of taking in the whole world? What does it do to us that we briefly have that privilege? And, then, what harm , when the fund of novelty in human experience runs dry? childhood Gregory Maguire
b372312 For many of us, the curtain has just come down on childhood. childhood curtain graduate next Mitch Albom
e4c945c "7 Up soda pop mixed with bright pink grenadine with a chemical-tasting maraschino cherry stuck to the plastic straw. It was one of those drinks marketed for children, but Mandy could see that she wasn't the only adult ordering one. For some reason or other these old-fashioned restaurants always seemed to attract old ladies ordering strawberry Jell-O with whipped cream, truck drivers ordering "worms and dirt" (chocolate pudding with Oreo cookies squished over the top in a glass bowl, fruit-flavoured gummy worms over the cookie crumbs) and businessmen trying not to get syrup from their hot fudge sundaes on their neckties and tailored suits. Mandy figured that maybe they were all trying to grasp a time way back in the past when they were all little children, excitedly ordering desert for a special occasion under the warm incandescent light from above, cheerful and bouncing music filling their minds. Hurriedly she ate the food, paid the tab and hurried back to her car in the bitter wind, not wanting to stick around for very long." adult bounce businessman canada car cherry childhood desert diner growing-up kid memory music shirley-temple snow swiss-chalet wind Rebecca McNutt
76f8363 One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep. childhood inspirational rites-of-passage Carlos Ruiz Zafón
f071080 Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me. childhood Samuel Beckett
6b1cdaf He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him. childhood Jonathan Safran Foer
fac752f Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child. childhood reading writers Roxane Gay
63b7543 My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special 'cry'. 'It's due to deformation of the crystal structure,' she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more. childhood science Oliver Sacks
2ca9e5f "COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!" In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees." childhood ends innocence loss motherhood sorrow Ursula K. Le Guin
c139406 A union of literary and scientific cultures - there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind. childhood literature science science-and-arts Oliver Sacks
b36a4ae Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach the point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me as an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child? Will the universe of all possible things I could be reminded of ever be mostly an adult universe? childhood Nicholson Baker
e17c362 [photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way. childhood photography science Oliver Sacks
233f0da I glanced in the first open door and stopped short. Desks. Four tiny desks. A wall of faded posters of alphabet animals. A blackboard, still showing the ghost of numbers. I blinked, certain I was seeing wrong. Derek nudged my legs, telling me to get moving. I looked at him, and I looked at the classroom. This was where Derek had grown up. Four tiny desks. Four little boys. Four young werewolves. For a second, I could see them--three boys working at the three clustered desks, Derek alone at the fourth, pushed slightly away, hunched over his work, trying to ignore the others. Derek nudged me again, whining softly, and I looked down to see him eyeing the room, every hair on his neck on end, anxious to get away from this place. childhood chloe derek lab werewolves Kelley Armstrong
95c1cd6 The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild. But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age. childhood freud golden-age hesiod infantile nostalgia prehistory silver-age victorians A.S. Byatt
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
41c06b3 She felt very old and mature and wise--which showed how young she was. She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed away forever. Where was it now--the glory and the dream? childhood dreams wisdom L.M. Montgomery
6734d89 "Karen was cuddling her favourite stuffed animal, a mint-green toy deer which she called "Annabelle". Sometimes Jesse wondered about this... Karen loved the taste of venison and couldn't wait to shoot her first deer so she could brag to her friends about it. She had a pink camo baseball cap with "hunter" embroidered on the front. She enjoyed watching every year as Robert took out his big steel-bladed saw and sliced the antlers off his latest prize. So, why'd she cry every time she watched Disney's Bambi? Why'd she treat an inanimate toy as a living thing, but a living thing as an inanimate toy?" -- bambi childhood deer hunter hunting inanimate-object rite-of-passage stuffed-animal Rebecca McNutt
910b4f9 "Tiddlywinks, tiddlywinks, I want to play tiddlywinks," chanted Ramona, shaking her head back and forth." childhood children humor playtime ramona Beverly Cleary
610bc0d Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations. childhood mysterious secrets stoicism Mary Doria Russell
35b006d Children's as good as 'rithmetic to set you findin' out things. childhood children knowledge learning motherhood parenthood parenting Frances Hodgson Burnett
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