Best 2381 quotes in «childhood quotes» category

People ask me where I got my x-ray powers. I inherited them from my parents in parental supervision. Erase the dots and your doubts if you think that I was 'raysed' alone.

People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.

...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.

People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me either way!

People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me wither way!

People will drive by their high school ten years down the road, just so they can pretend that thinking "not much has changed" is actually true. When really, everything has changed. The air smells the same, but the roads have cracked more. The roads have cracked so much they now look like the skin on a crocodile's back. And all the fields, green in the summers, golden in the autumns, have all been paved over with new reasons to never come back.

Peter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it's the book of my adulthood too. It's a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to editions that I've had and lost, with various illustrators' work in them. It brings back moments sitting reading it with my mother. It brings back my first contact with the Disney cartoon. It brings back standing in the play-yard when I was a kid, when the wind was really blowing, and closing my eyes, spreading my arms and pretending I could fly. It brings back childhood dreams of flying. It brings back the first encounter I ever had with an invented world... Never Never Land was really the first journey I took to an invented world which I believed in wholly and completely. I remember the immense solidarity that I felt with the Lost Boys, with Peter, with the Indians - how much I wanted to be a Red Indian - how much the saving of Tiger Lily meant to me as a kid, how much I wanted to one day wake up and save an Indian squaw from drowning.

Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was out in the open. Their lives were dirty and squalid, but they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Here, things seemed so normal, so perfect, but it was all a deception.

[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.

Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.

Place Saint-Sulpice, la main dans la main de ma tante Marguerite qui ne savait pas très bien me parler, je me suis demandé soudain: "Comment me voit-elle?" et j'éprouvai un sentiment aigu de supériorité : car je connaissais mon for intérieur, et elle l'ignorait; trompée par les apparences, elle ne doutait pas, voyant mon corps inachevé, qu'au-dedans de moi rien ne manquait; je me promis, lorsque je serais grande, de ne pas oublier qu'on est à cinq ans un individu complet.

Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposed limitations.

Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific...

Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight

Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood.

Say what you will, dear sister, we do what we do for the promise of our youth. Yet it is always they who scar beneath the points of daggers.

School came to bore me. It took up far too much time which I would rather have spent drawing battles and playing with fire.

Seeing the person yeu love come home Happiness is so simple to a child

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.

She bent and placed a single daisy upon the grave. A simple white daisy. The plainest of flowers, perhaps the purest, Elspeth thought. It had cost next to nothing at all, and perhaps that was the point. She wasn’t being cheap. She was being symbolic. In her mind, Andrea deserved only the unstained purity of the simplest of daisies, a daisy that was unsoiled by a wealth that couldn’t find the money to have claimed her soul.

She came towards me with a juicy gash between her legs that smelled like my best friend's sister" Just when I thought I'd escaped them all She comes reeling herself in pulling at my strings her hand quick to find my zipper She moaned the way a drunk old lady does And I wasn't even inside her yet "You don't have anywhere else to be," she managed to say... "My wounds have been reopened tonight already," I muttered I caught wind of the gully ...the part of her she once kept sacred as a Christian I smelled the information I lifted my hand into the air and hailed a cab He rolled down his window and saw her "Find another cab," he said, and sped off into the night I took her home because she said she was lonely really she was drunk off something some memory or some choice she walked funny... -one of her heels had broken On the couch I left her, Before I could go, she grabbed my cock I slapped her across the face and she pulled harder Her eyes stayed closed Her lips dripped Her grip clenched I wasn't getting out of this one unscathed "If I take my pants off, will you let me go?" I asked "If you take your pants off, I'll be suckin' that cock till you pass out from all the screamin'..." I slapped her again, because she needed it She laughed Saying her cousin beat her harder Saying her father knew how to really... ...make things happen I asked her what her father's number was Let's get his motherfucking self up here to take you away, that's what I said She said he died, or killed himself "What's the difference really," she said, chewing on her hair She let go of my cock on her own accord And she opened her eyes for a moment She closed them again And I could tell she was sleeping Her eyes opened once more Her face red where I'd hit her She tasted the blood on her lip "Do you think if we remind ourselves enough, we can make up for all the pain we've caused others?" I said to her, "We can't. All we can do is keep ourselves from all those who don't deserve it.

She could taste her children on her tongue, the colors they wore. Jacqueline was yellow. Gunnar was blue. Gabriela had always been red. All their weight. Their history inside of her. And she remembered her mother's synesthesia and was startled as guilt crept up her throat.

She'd grown up with few friends. She'd played with the neighborhood boys, chasing pigeons and catching fireflies with them until it was no longer considered proper. By then, the girls in the village scorned her. In front of her mother and father, they pretended to be polite, but Mulan knew what they said about her behind her back. Ill-bred and ill-mannered. She has the temper of a firecracker and the grace of a bull. It's a miracle she even looks like a girl- look at the hay in her hair, and the dirt on her face. What a discredit to her mother! The insults had never bothered Mulan too much. Back then, her mother comforted her by telling her to ignore what people said, and talking to her father would always make her feel better. And she'd had Khan for company... then, later, Mushu and Cri-Kee.

She'd loved birds long before her physical limitations kept her grounded. She'd found a birding diary of her grandmother's in a trunk in the attic when she was Frankie's age, and when she asked her father about it, he dug through boxes on a shelf high above her head, handing down a small pair of binoculars and some field guides. She'd seen her first prothonotary warbler when she was nine, sitting alone on a tupelo stump in the forest, swatting at mosquitoes targeting the pale skin behind her ears. She glanced up from the book she was reading only to be startled by an unexpected flash of yellow. Holding her breath, she fished for the journal she kept in her pocket, focusing on the spot in the willow where he might be. A breeze stirred the branches, and she saw the brilliant yellow head and underparts standing out like petals of a sunflower against the backdrop of leaves; the under tail, a stark white. His beak was long, pointed and black; his shoulders a mossy green, a blend of the citron yellow of his head and the flat slate of his feathers. He had a black dot of an eye, a bead of jet set in a field of sun. Never had there been anything so perfect. When she blinked he disappeared, the only evidence of his presence a gentle sway of the branch. It was a sort of magic, unveiled to her. He had been hers, even if only for a few seconds. With a stub of pencil- 'always a pencil,' her grandmother had written. 'You can write with a pencil even in the rain'- she noted the date and time, the place and the weather. She made a rough sketch, using shorthand for her notes about the bird's coloring, then raced back to the house, raspberry canes and brambles speckling bloody trails across her legs. In the field guide in the top drawer of her desk, she found him again: prothonotary warbler, 'prothonotary' for the clerks in the Roman Catholic Church who wore robes of a bright yellow. It made absolute sense to her that something so beautiful would be associated with God. After that she spent countless days tromping through the woods, toting the drab knapsack filled with packages of partially crushed saltines, the bottles of juice, the bruised apples and half-melted candy bars, her miniature binoculars slung across one shoulder. She taught herself how to be patient, how to master the boredom that often accompanied careful observation. She taught herself how to look for what didn't want to be seen.

She had felt good for a few moments, racing across the face of the hill on her old bike, but the happy feeling had burned itself out and left behind a thin, cold rage. She was no longer entirely sure who she was angry with though. Her anger didn't have a fixed point. It was a soft whir of emotion to match the soft whir of the spokes.

She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, 'It's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.' That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear. She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well-wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, 'She's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.' This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the 'dead' part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended.

She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.

She knew him in that way you can only know a person as a child. Like if you cracked away the adult shell, you'd find that child, happily sitting inside, smiling at you.

She looked at me for a second and said, "Oh, never mind. I guess it's true what Mom said? That you've led a sheltered life?" I said I thought the description fairly apt.

She meant well. But knew nothing about children and the anguish they suffered.

She might be the best-dressed little girl in her elementary school class, but she was still a Greek. Her parents spoke a foreign language, their food was different, and she looked different from the children she went to school with in Corktown.

She said, "Daddy thinks that all the world's magic is almost evolved out." I thought of Roebuck Lake, its swamps and sloughs and loblollies and breaks of cypress and cane, its sunken treetops and stobs and bream beds and sleepy gar rolling over and over and over, its baptizing pools and bridges and mussels and mosquitoes and turkey vultures and, now in the drought, the gray flaking mud-flats and logs crowded with turtles and sometimes a fat snake yawning its tame old cottony mouth like a well-fed dog in a pen. I said, "Is that what the freak show is?" She said, "Dirty miracles.

She slipped from her tall chair (why don't we remember living in a world where everything was absurdly outsize, tables and chairs and spoons, door knobs too high to reach, too fat to grasp?) and went to look.

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in the small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants, One! two! three! This summer will never end. It starts every day with a shower of Mr. Whippy notes and your best friend's knock at the door, finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in, through the bats shrilling among the black lace trees. This is Everysummer decked in all its best glory.

Play is fun, but is also meaningful and complex. The more intelligent the animal, the more it plays.

Play is the highest form of research.

Play is also a way to be close and, even more important, a way to reconnect after the closeness has been severed. Chimpanzees like to tickle one another's palms, especially after they have had a fight. Thus, the second purpose of play serves our incredible - almost bottomless - need for attachment and affection and closeness.

Play with your dolls for not more than half an hour, no more than fifteen minutes, no more than a second, a millisecond. If you learned math as fast as you ran outside to play, then you might be a genius. But you do not and you are not. You're a hole where knowledge goes to sleep.

Podré olvidar muchas experiencias de la vida, pero no las de la infancia. Siempre recuerdo aquel verso que dice: ¡Oh, infancia! ¡Oh, mi amiga! Y lo que importa en él es lo que no se dice. Nuestra infancia es ciertamente nuestra amiga, pero nosotros no fuimos amigos de nuestra infancia porque entonces no existíamos como somos ahora. Aquel ser desvalido que fuimos a veces nos conmueve porque nadie pudo comprenderlo del todo, salvo nosotros... que todavía no estábamos a su lado.

Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.

Pronto comenzamos a dudar de la cigüeña de París, de dónde somos y cómo hemos llegado hasta aquí. Nos perdemos en el terreno de responsabilidades, el Coco no está, nos dormimos tranquilos, terminan los infantilismos, y con ellos, los gusanos de seda. Nos parten la corona de papel albal, aprendemos a despedirnos y dejamos de tirarnos por el tobogán.

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.

Remember when we were children and life was simple; how I yearn to return to those days.

Resiliency is the essence of a global positive framework...

She was inbetween, with her childhood at the back of her and something illogical and confusing that loomed in front.

She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.

She would never, ever understand the idea that a child, especially an infant, was of more value than an adult who had already gained all the skills needed to benefit the community. The death of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around.

Show how you can get me back my childhood Do not keep reminding me of my past otherwise

Si, bien avant la puberté, et parfois même dès sa toute petite enfance, elle nous apparaît déjà comme sexuellement specifiée, ce n'est pas que de mystérieux instincts immédiatement la vouent à la passivité, à la coquetterie, à la maternité, c'est que lintervention d'autrui dans la vie de l'enfant et presque originelle et que dès ses premières années sa vocation lui est impérieusement insufflée.