Childhood Quotes - Page 19

Mom hadn't met Ramon; her advocacy was more arm's length - petitions, the website, letter writing, meetings with politicians. Her friend Hanna had formed a close friendship with Ramon though, visiting him as often as she could. Hanna told me that Ramon's greatest regret was that he wouldn't get to see his daughter grow up.And Jeremy's dad, who had that opportunity, was just throwing it away.It made me furious, and I couldn't let it go.

In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love.But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves.In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning.

They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.

What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.

Every child matures, which is both a blessing and a damn shame. Children can imagine worlds that never exist, worlds far more interesting and consoling than an adult knows.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

Time grants a unique perspective which allows us to see events through a filter of accumulated wisdom.

Being a 'good' parent is more about the parent, and, less about the 'supposedly-could-have-been-bad' child.

I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren't called turtlenecks, I wouldn't have worn them.

You know one day, you're going to look back on these days. And everyone you went to high school with will either be getting married to each other, shitting out kids, or dropping dead like flies," when she spoke, Miss Jenson sighed at the end of every few words; she must have been narrating her own thoughts she might have otherwise kept to herself, "and everything you never did, you'll never be able to even try.

In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm clouds in the offing somewhere over Grantchester....Barrett's afternoonishness was far more supple and engaging. It superimposed the hippie cult of eternal solstice on the pre-teatime daydreams of one's childhood, occasioned by a slick of sunlight on a chest of drawers....His afternoonishness is lit by an importunate adult intelligence that can't quite get back to the place it longs to be....Barrett created the same precocious longing in adolescents."I remember 'See Emily Play' drifting across a school corridor in 1967...and I remember the powerful wish to stay suspended indefinitely in that music...I also remember the quasi-adult intimation that this wasn't pos

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.

Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night.

I never felt more free in this world, than when I was five years old

Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…

Adoption isn't just a childhood experience, it's a life-long experience.

Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what?

How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing.

There are miracles and glory in every child. Our glory lies in empowering them to flourish their glory.

The eternal child. - We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood:how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time of life tolive without play and fairy tales! We give these things other names, to besure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidencethat they are the same things - for the child too regards play as his workand fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from apedantic division of life into different stages - as though each broughtsomething new - and a poet ought for once to present a man of twohundred: one, that is, who really does live without play and fairy tales.

That's the most terrible thing about being a child; you're convinced that it's all your fault." Lulu

The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.

Some people discard their childhood like an old hat. They forget about it like a phone number that's no longer valid. They used to be kids, then they became adults - but what are they now?Only those who grow up but continue to be children are humans.

The past does not define me, it ignites me. The past is not a piece of me, it has placed me

I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you're part of a big social scene, it's an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow,wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.

I should mention here that librarians tell me never to tell this story, and especially never to paint myself as a feral child who was raised in libraries by patient librarians; the tell me they are worried that people will misinterpret my story and use it as an excuse to use their libraries as free day care for their children.

I try to clutch onto those last moments in the place that I was born to, but I was so busy *living* them! How was I to know I'd have to capture everything I ever wanted to remember of Eire for the rest of my life?

It is very nice to think The world is full of meat and drink With little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place.

I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words. But I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

When I was a child in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately, around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness...

Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood.

My father used to say that when he was growing up the water was clear and there were tons of fireflies everywhere... He felt sorry for the kids growing up today... But it is really beautiful... Time will just keep on passing... we'll get old... and look back on the past. I hope we can always say... how great things were.

You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.

Unlike grownups children have little need to deceive themselves.

When you are a child at home alone, you’re afraid someone might come; when you are old and at home alone, you’re afraid no one will come.