Childhood Quotes - Page 8

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.

This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.

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.

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

The verbal patterns and the patterns of behavior we present to children in these lighthearted confections are likely to influence them for the rest of their lives. These aesthetic impressions, just like the moral teachings of early childhood, remain indelible.

Parents who daily read Robert Lewis Stevenson to their children and surrounds them with blocks, plastic animals, and some cardboard boxes or kitchen pots and pans are going to produce a qualitatively different child from those who spend that time on TV or videos, even if their choices ARE only Winnie the Pooh and Mr. Rogers.

She was always daydreaming. She never wanted to live in the real world; she always seemed to be separated from other children her age. They couldn’t understand her or her imagination. She was always thinking outside of the box, breaking rules, and only following what her heart told her was right.

Making up for lost time?" "Yes," I say. "A lot of things were stolen from my childhood. Lots of important things. And now I have to get them back." "In order to keep on li

I think that saving a little child And bringing him to his own Is a derned sight better business Than loafing around the throne.

During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid wants to be.

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

And at twelve, heading for adulthood, a child fears that the way she is at that moment is all she's ever going to be.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I reasoned as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

She said, "Daddy thinks that all the world's magic is almost evolved out."I thought of Roebuck Lake, its swamps and sloughs and loblollies and breaks of cypress and cane, its sunken treetops and stobs and bream beds and sleepy gar rolling over and over and over, its baptizing pools and bridges and mussels and mosquitoes and turkey vultures and, now in the drought, the gray flaking mud-flats and logs crowded with turtles and sometimes a fat snake yawning its tame old cottony mouth like a well-fed dog in a pen.I said, "Is that what the freak show is?"She said, "Dirty miracles.

She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.

The birth of a new born baby is a great joy.

Spanking a child is about the parent not the child. The child will learn more from positive correction than physical manipulation.

You’re a good boy. I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good

Yes, we can be assured that if we don't change and turn our lives around to become like a little child again we will definitely not get a look at the fulness of our purpose, let alone get in.

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

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

I knew that the tears of adults were wetter, saltier, and much, much sadder than those of a child

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.

Childhood is not all candy stores and recess; it’s frustrations and confusions, too.

The earlier years - the ones I've just been telling you about - they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can't help feeling a sort of glow.

I want a God that makes me twirl.' I jumped off the couch. I untucked and unbuttoned my shirt so it would flow like a robe. 'Like this. I can do this for God.' I held my hands out. I twirled and twirled and twirled. 'Look,' I said. 'Look.

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.

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we're growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free child soul.

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

He started to wonder if maybe they had been raptured while he was in school. He always worried the Lord would show up when he wasn't around. Or when he was on the toilet, taking care of a number two.

Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don't get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives.

I like the smell of my Grandma's soap - I used to sit in the bath and eat it.

This tiny, white-washed Infants' room was a brief but cosy anarchy. In that short time allowed us we played and wept, broke things, fell asleep, cheeked the teacher, discovered things we could do to each other, and exhaled our last guiltless days.My desk companions were those two blonde girls, already puppyishly pretty, whose names and bodies were to distract and haunt me for the next fifteen years of my life. Poppy and Jo were limper chums; they sat holding hands all day; and there was a female self-possession about their pink sticky faces that made me shout angrily at them.Vera was another I studied and liked; she was lonely, fuzzy and short. I felt a curious compassion for stumpy Vera; and it was through her, and no beauty, that I got into trouble and received the first public shock of my life. How it happened was simple, and I was innocent, so it seemed. She came up to me in the playground one morning and held her face close to mine. I had a stick in my hand, so I hit her on the head with it. Her hair was springy, so I hit her again and watched her mouth open up with a yell. To my surprise a commotion broke out around me, cries of scandal from the older girls, exclamations of horror and heavy censure mixed with Vera's sobbing wails. I was intrigued, not alarmed, that by wielding a beech stick I was able to cause such a stir. So I hit her again, without spite or passion, then walked off to try something else.

Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.

To express nostalgia for a childhood we no longer share is to deny the actual significance and humanity of children.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Gym should be illegal. It's humiliating.

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.

In an age of iPhones and Playstations, it's great to see that somebody's still rocking the bus-on-a-string.

For him, it appeared he could freezethe moment in a memory; only for it to slip through hishands like water.

It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.

Father never approved of my toysSaw them as child's playthingsI was a childThey were my worldI ruled thereAnd he stepped on themDestroying themAnd in turnDestroyed meI should have been left to playNow I must step on everything

They didn't really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grown-ups. And they never learned to be just kids, either. Stuck in never-never land. Kinda sad.

Throughout my entire miserable childhood I woke at least once a night weeping from overwhelming delight. I did it hungry, I did it after beatings, I did it after the deaths of loved ones.Now you tell me if I’m crazy or if I’ve always been blessed.

Peanut butter is the pate of childhood.

He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.

The very matrix of our ability to love and bond in later life, maternal sensitivity – or lack thereof – also determines cultural tenor.

From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.

A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person’s prosodic inner tune.

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.

There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

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.

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

The imagination is precious. Don't lose it. Don't lose the child in you.

Now, ten or more years later, far away from her home or even any thought of having a home, she again touched the feeling from that long ago day, being alone but not lonely, of being solitary yet sufficient.

Parts of my 20s and 30s have gone by in a flash but my childhood is with me all the time.