Quotes About Childhood

Even 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.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

I think trauma gets a reductive treatment. We tend to think only violence or molestation or total abandonment qualify as "childhood trauma," but there are so many ruptures and disturbances in childhood that imprint themselves on us. Attachment begets trauma, in that broader sense, and so if we've ever been dependent on anyone, I think there is an Imago blueprint in us somewhere.

In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.

Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.

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.

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.

My childhood was marked by the great fear of nuclear holocaust. We practiced our Civil Defense Drills, lining up in hallways, curled to the floor, but we knew we'd die or, worse, survive only to suffer radiation and slow death.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.

I had a serious childhood illness - sort of like spinal meningitis - that led to a three-month hospitalization. Afterward, I couldn't be insured because of a pre-existing condition.

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

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

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

My childhood was spent embracing one literary heroine after another. I identified passionately with each one and would slavishly imitate them.

I still had a normal childhood with my friends from school.

I don't have any friends from my childhood because I didn't stay at one school for very long.

Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

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

A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.

I wonder if I love the communal act of eating so much because throughout my childhood, with four older brothers and a mom who worked in the restaurant business, I spent a lot of time fending for myself, eating alone - and recognizing how eating together made all the difference.

Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.

The most wonderful thing in life is to do something for a child because they're children for such a short time. We can't allow ourselves to let them live a miserable childhood.

I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

Let's say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it's able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they're the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is "proof" that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft.

The elements of instruction should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion.

Since childhood I’d been suspected of imagination

I'd spent my childhood thinking bad things, bad things every day. It had made me sick, but it had made me determined.

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

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

I always had all of these childhood fantasies about wanting to invent things, like a spaceship or a time machine. And everyone's imagined what it would be like to go back in time and change things, to see what would happen if you had a different life. 'Back to the Future' fulfills all of those daydreams. It's the perfect movie.

We are not at the mercy of events that transpired in our childhood unless we believe we are.

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.

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.

My mother's brother was killed while clearing mines in 1945. Those are things that mark your childhood and they help explain why we are so devoted to European unity.

I wanted the Andy of Toy Story 3 to be right on the cusp, straddling childhood and adulthood ... I wanted to find this sweet spot where he had gotten tall and had clearly grown up but still retained many boyish qualities, including a boyish charm.

Today, the United States is No. 1 in corporate profits, No. 1 in CEO salaries, No. 1 in childhood poverty and No. 1 in income and wealth inequality in the industrialized world.

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.

I didn’t play video games because my parents didn’t allow it. That was banned from my childhood experience.

With childhood comes a brief grace period of ignorant bliss -- when you're not aware of the pain around you. That is the most special, truly unique time. It is the core of adult lament.

Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood.

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.

It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story.

In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

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