Quotes About Childhood

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

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.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

The role you've been ascribed in childhood can twist or break apart or seem outgrown, especially when you have your own family and begin to see your own childhood from a different angle. You remember. You reassess. I think that was the kernel of the novel for me. This idea that you change but that your family, the people you were born into, might find that change hard to accept. You no longer fit the mold you've always been ascribed. When the adult children in the book converge back on their small family home there's a sense that they don't fit there anymore.

Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness later on, but it's never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been bathing in this environment during childhood.

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.

We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?

As we try to change, we will discover within us a fierce struggle between our loyalty to that battle-scarred victim of his own childhood, our father, and the father we want to be. We must meet our childhood father at close range: get to know him, learn to forgive him, and somehow, go beyond him.

If 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.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

My dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America.

Unlike most actors, I did not have a horrible childhood. Most actors have had miserable childhoods and they go into acting to hide from their real life. I had no problem playing in the woods all day. People just sort of left me alone. I think I'm gonna go back to those woods.

I am much more powerful today than the old programs and mind viruses that I absorbed in my childhood.

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

I had a stutter 'till... I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.

When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be.

The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.

If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.

Childhood is not a race to see how quickly a child can read, write and count. It is a small window of time to learn and develop at the pace that is right for each individual child. Earlier is not better.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

Parenthood brings profound pleasure and satisfactions--the unparalleled pleasure of caring so intensely for another human being, of watching growth, of reliving childhood, of seeing oneself in a new perspective, and of understanding more about life.

Apprenticeship is one of the dearest roles of childhood, not just watching Dad or Mother, but being taught a hands-on trade.

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.

The most important influence in my childhood was my father.

I maybe missed money in my childhood, but I didn't miss love, that's for sure. My dad wasn't there, but I can tell you not even once did I think I was missing something.

Differentiating from parental introjects and psychological defences based on the emotional pain of childhood is essential not only for neurotic or seriously disturbed individuals; it is a central developmental issue in every person’s life.

How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.

In a way, you normalize your own childhood to yourself, so I never thought about how much I wrote as a kid. So I was there, confronted with it - so many notebooks, so many tiny plays. Every week we put on a play. We had a big futon, so my sister and I would use the futon as our stage, and I wrote little skits and made her faint because I found it so funny.

I had an amazing childhood.

My real name is Nils and Booboo is a childhood nickname. It's not two words or two capital B's, it's B-o-o-b-o-o.

Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.

My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor.

I'm not the most sophisticated person. I'm not the smartest person in the world. But, I know what makes me excited about life, from Spielberg movies to Michael Jackson music videos to cartoons on Saturday mornings, which made my childhood.

Comedy, your funny bone, is formed in childhood.

This life is but the childhood of our immortality.

I don't miss much about my childhood. I lived in a good neighborhood, a wacky neighborhood. It was a very boy-heavy neighborhood - kind of Lord of the Flies-y. So many weird things happened, funny things.

Childhood is supposed to be happy, and if you can't remember yours with any happiness, what hope have you later, when life starts handing you fresh grief?

My childhood was never great. We moved from place to place a lot. There were times when we had no definite place to stay. So, a basic level of security was not always there. Therefore, when you finally make it out, and you become who I am, you're humbled by the memories of those situations.

I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.

For there is no bond more lasting than that formed by the mutual confidences of that magic time when youth is slipping from the sheath of childhood and beginning to wonder what lies for it beyond those misty hills that bound the golden road.

The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.

I lost my childhood. I didn't play football or video games. Or have birthdays or the love of a family.

Many children grow through adolescence with no ripples whatever and land smoothly and predictably in the adult world with both feet on the ground. Some who have stumbled and bumbled through childhood suddenly burst into bloom. Most shake, steady themselves, zigzag, fight, retreat, pick up, take new bearings, and finally find their own true balance.