Popular quotes about Childhood! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 19
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.
Anne LamottEven the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a person is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.
Black ElkNew York rushed to get students into early childhood programs, but the research is clear that it has to be high quality. What we are giving poor kids now in early childhood is nothing like what we are giving middle-class kids in most places.
Pedro NogueraI have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.
Edward HirschIn reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my OWN childhood vividly; I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let the adults *know* I knew... it would scare them.
Art SpiegelmanThe greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation.....There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.
Robert S. MendelsohnYou're the hero of your own story. I had let go of my own story from my own childhood and whatever anger I had and I began to see it from a very different place. It's really easy to be like "This thing happened to me! Look what they did to me or are doing to me." These are such powerful ideas and it's so easy to hold onto them forever. When I let go of those ideas it was easier to see my childhood from different points of view.
Baron VaughnI think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.
Maurice Sendak... social environment in childhood affects achieved adult height, life chances, and ultimately mortality rates in adult life. (...) ... social circumstances acting in childhood do have a persisting effect on adult disease rates, in addition to influences acting in adulthood.
Michael Marmotthere are - as every one knows - two kinds of writing: one coming out of your vitals and the other from the top of your head. The first is the only sort from which any true private pleasure can be gained, for it is a way of getting something out of life which seemed to be there in childhood, when childhood is quite over.
J. E. BuckroseWe find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep inthe memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.
Selma FraibergEarly childhood development has proved to be very beneficial and very cost-effective in societies where this is been tried. So let's not confine ourselves to primary education. Let's think of early childhood development and education as a whole.
Aung San Suu KyiIf the goal is to dramatically improve college completion rates, not college-going rates by itself but college completion, it's not just a college problem. We need a big focus on early childhood education. Our early childhood education system is pretty good in this country. Not enough students have opportunity. And, very discouragingly, they lose their advantage because they go to poor schools after that. So, let's focus on our babies.
Arne DuncanThere 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.
Graham GreeneWhen we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.
Anna Brownell JamesonI don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
Robert RedfordMy dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America.
Olivia WildeThe main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.
George SaundersI have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories . . One knows what stories can do, how they can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds. . . .One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires.
James HillmanI realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.
Alma GuillermoprietoI shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?
Rachel KushnerI don't particularly like to go see 3D movies, but when I'm doing it I kind of do enjoy it. I enjoy seeing the image in 3D, there's a childhood fun about being able to see those dimensions.
Bryan SingerI like the way corduroys feel. I like the sort of jean aspect of corduroys, but also the texture of them. They probably remind me of my childhood, too, I think. I wore cords, and my dad had a corduroy jacket.
Noah BaumbachThere is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.
Fyodor DostoevskyChildhood has it's own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.
Jean-Jacques RousseauI'd always had a childhood ambition to go into the investment capital business, and spent twenty-odd years in it. But the thought of spending the second half of my career in the same business was boring, so I looked around for other opportunities .
Chris CorriganBut where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?
Madeleine L'EngleI think back to when I was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s, during the [John] McCarthy era, with two parents who founded a Unitarian Church. We lived in a little frame house, and my bedroom was just down the hall from the kitchen. My favorite memories of childhood are of the smell of coffee wafting into my bedroom as my parents and their friends talked about the big, important things - about racism and about how to move our country to live its values.
Frances Moore LappรฉI feel things can always be funny, but that's probably because I have some kind of leftover childhood need to make people laugh. For somebody like me, that's the thing you excel at.
Jesse EisenbergOne of my favorite people I got to meet was my childhood idol, Vincent Price. I got to not only meet him, but become friendly with him before he passed away.
Cassandra PetersonFive common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.
James J. KilpatrickThe childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.
Walter IsaacsonLet positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.
Swami VivekanandaAll of us have that feeling of some deficiency from our childhood. I think that's a universal thing.
Rian JohnsonI do believe that people who write for children are deeply connected to their own childhood.
Judy BlumeMom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
Ethel WatersHence the Bible has no record of his years of preparation; the record is very abrupt. Something about his childhood is said, very fragmentary. And only once is he mentioned: when he was twelve years of age and he started arguing with the priests in the temple - that's all. Then there is a gap of eighteen years... nothing is mentioned.
RajneeshStarting at age four, my mom decided that she was not going to have an idle child in the house. So I started taking dance lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then I was in acting classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and I was also modeling on Saturdays. And that was my childhood.
Chandra WilsonExcessive competitiveness, anxiety, hostility, suspiciousness, all originate in the nursery years. That is why, if we want a world of peace and not violence, love and not hate, cooperation and not murder, justice and not selfishness, we have to learn how to make childhood more happy. No nobler task could be pursued by our generation.
Joshua L. LiebmanMemory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon on puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten.
Alan Moore