Quotes About Childhood

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.

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

You'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.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

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.

We remember childhood as the fabulous years of our lives, and nations remember their childhood as fabulous years.

The children's writer not only makes a satisfactory connection between [the writer's] present maturity and his past childhood, he also does the same for his child-characters in reverse - makes the connection between their present childhood and their future maturity. That their maturity is never visibly achieved makes no difference; the promise of it is there.

The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.

We 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.

A poor child who receives high-quality early childhood development is 40 percent less likely to need special education, twice as likely to attend college and dramatically more likely to survive childhood.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

And I wanted to do a movie [Moonrise Kingdom] about a childhood romance - a very powerful experience of childhood romance. About what it's like to just be blindsided, when you're in fifth grade or sixth grade, by these kinds of feelings. Along the way, I sort of mixed in some interest in "young adult fantasy" writing.

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in.

From early childhood, my thrust was to get into the movies.

I survived my childhood by birthing many separate identities to stand in for one another in times of great stress and fear.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

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

I have been luckier than anyone I know or even heard of. I had a very happy childhood, a good education, I enjoyed working as a teacher, journalist and author. I have loved a wonderful man for over 33 years, and I believe he loves me, too.

My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom.

I 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?

I'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 .

Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.

Lil Wayne, I ain't mad at him man, he did his thing, he stepped up his lyrical game, he the most improved rapper out of anybody. I've seen him from childhood status to what he's doing right now. He stepped up his rap game, so he deserves the success he had. And no one else was even doing near what he was doing, so I applaud him too.

The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet. Have you ever seen a baby bouncing up and down in the crib in time to some music? When you think of it, some of that baby's first messages from his or her parents may have been lullabies, or at least the music of their speaking voices. All of us have had the experience of hearing a tune from childhood and having that melody evoke a memory or a feeling. The music we hear early on tends to stay with us all our lives.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

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.

The Things that never can come back, are several - Childhood - some forms of Hope - the Dead.

You draw on your own childhood every time you tee it up as an actor.

Since childhood I’d been suspected of imagination

But nothing warps time quite like childhood

I think from my earliest childhood, I liked to tell stories, put on plays and write things. It's funny to think of it as an "artistic bug" because I didn't necessarily want to be an artist. It's just who I was and how I communicate.

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.

In fact, my entire childhood consisted of looking at photographs in which the viewer sees the ball behind the line, looking through the goal net, and the poor goalkeeper in front of the net.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. Extract from 'Memories of childhood and youth.'

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

On the day long after childhood when I suddenly heard of his death, the sky grew dark above my head. I was walking on a Southern highway, and a friend driving in a pony carriage passed me, stopped and said, "Have you heard that Charles Dickens is dead?" It was as if I had been robbed of one of my dearest friends.

I remember seeing war hero Jimmy Doolittle fly a Gee Bee racer there. He was my childhood hero. Many years later, I was lucky enough to go hunting with him.

I was born in 1953, in Paris. But soon after my birth my family (I have one sister) moved into a rent apartment in suburbs of Paris named Romainville. That time my parents were freshly married and it was extremely hard to find an apartment in Paris for a young married couple. To say they found a flat in a blocks of houses which was built after the second World War - and this is the place where I spent my childhood.

Hence 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.

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.

Excessive 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.

I grew up with probably three different authors having a seminal influence on my childhood, Dr. Seuss being one and Maurice Sendak being another. That was my parents, who exposed me to their stories. That's how I was introduced to the whole idea of not just reading, but storytelling in general.