Quotes About Childhood

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.

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.

My childhood dream was always to be on Broadway. I wanted to end up in TV and film. It's kind of flipped, and I'm not mad about it, but my childhood dream is Broadway and I want to end up there.

The achievement of freedom is hardly possible without the felt mourning. This ability to mourn, i.e, to give up the illusion of a happy childhood, can restore vitality and creativity if a person is able to experience that he was never loved as a child for what he was, but for his achievements, success and good qualities. And that he sacrificed his childhood for this love, this will shake him very deeply.

After all, isn't that what really draws the line between childhood and adulthood, knowing that you are solely responsible for yourself? If so, then my childhood ended at fifteen.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

What was on the agenda was school and social life and those kinds of things. So I was the middle of five kids. So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that's part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

I felt I had a very innocent childhood and I feel privileged by that. But as an adult, I know that there were people who didn't have that. There are a lot of teens who haven't had as easy a childhood as me, and having literature that explores these "darker" parts helps relieve the burden and stress they may be feeling. As a writer, there is often a temptation to draw back when we write for teens - to preserve their innocence. But the reality is, if someone has already had that innocence taken in their life, then not writing about it is just brushing it under the rug.

Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.

Oneness with Nature is the glory of childhood; oneness with childhood is the glory of the Teacher.

I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called - appropriately enough - Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.

There 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.

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.

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

When 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.

What is it like to fall asleep? What happens? Where do we go? Why don't we remember? Since childhood most of us have wondered about the mystery of sleep.

Striding tall through Lauren St John's gorgeously written memoir is her father, and chapter after chapter their relationship is untangled and celebrated. Joy and a hunger for life infuse this book -- whether St John is writing about the harrowing years of Rhodesia's civil war, her childhood adventures in the bush, or the breaking apart of her family. Rainbow's End is a most generous and wise book.

If I am told my loving you had to happen because of some Freudian stuff about my childhood, that might be degrading or deflationary, but if I am told it had to happen because you are such a wonderful person that I couldn't possibly resist your charms, or because we are so incredibly compatible, then necessity seems very romantic.

I'm slightly pessimistic about human nature, about how close it's possible to bond with those around you. Dying alone is a deep fear for most people. I'm not scared of death but I'm scared of dying scared. Maybe everything else in life comes from those two points: the separation anxiety of childhood and the ultimate fear of dying alone.

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?

You never know how things are going to fit. So, you don't count your eggs until they hatch. You can't pre-project that. I mean, this was literally like a childhood fantasy of mine, to be able to work in action. You know, growing up on Disney films like Pocahontas and wanting to enter into that, or Aladdin and how he's fighting - being your own hero, being your own heroine is like every one's dream.

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Oh, be assured, fellow teachers, that there is no time in life so favorable to sound conversion as early childhood.

She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one's childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by.

It's never too late to change the programming imprinted in childhood, carried in our genes or derived from previous lives; the solution is mindfulness in the present moment.

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.

I 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.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

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

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

Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood.

I had a really nice childhood; I had great parents. I earned my allowance by washing dishes, and in the summer I earned my allowance by working in daddy's garden.

The most important influence in my childhood was my father.

My childhood was epitomized by my parents who were uneducated but had a doctorate in love. My dad pressed coats and through my mom and dad I learned about love, family and respecting people. They never went to high school but they had within them every element that makes a great American. They had pride and a great work ethic and they knew how to do things the right way.

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

One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.

Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.

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.

I didn't have a blueprint from my childhood that I could call on, which is an enormous deficit when you're trying to put together a family life. I didn't see a family life where men were thriving inside of it. You know, my dad tended to blame the family for his inability to achieve what he wanted to achieve, you know? So, unfortunately, I was coming from that particular frame of mind.

I don’t know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss...

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

Listen, everything I did in my childhood was competitive. Everything we did my dad made it into a game to win. We used to drive my mum nuts.

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.