Best 2381 quotes in «childhood quotes» category

I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found Columns whose gray illegible advertisements My soul has memorized world after world: LOST - NOTHING. STRAYED FROM NOWHERE. NO REWARD.

I have grown up listening to my grandparents’ stories about ‘the other side’ of the border. But, as a child, this other side didn’t quite register as Pakistan, or not-India, but rather as some mythic land devoid of geographic borders, ethnicity and nationality. In fact, through their stories, I imagined it as a land with mango orchards, joint families, village settlements, endless lengths of ancestral fields extending into the horizon, and quaint local bazaars teeming with excitement on festive days. As a result, the history of my grandparents’ early lives in what became Pakistan essentially came across as a very idyllic, somewhat rural, version of happiness.

I have heard it said that a happy childhood is a curse, because what follows can never measure up. All I can say is, those people must want too much; they can't accept that life is a series of struggles and that happiness can be found in overcoming them, drawing strength from the reserves laid down in the good years.

I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.

I hope you never seek validation from others in any aspect of your life I hope you are confident in your desires and remain true to your personal passions I hope you cling to wonder and curiosity I hope you recognize your power to manifest an intentional and tranquil life I hope you are capable of being happy for others I hope you understand that gratification is fleeting, as is every emotion and moment I hope you find peace in simplicity I hope you transform this world, but do not become lost in the trend

If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we'd all have a very Merry Christmas, I heard my aunt Diane boom in my head. Those words had been the bane of my childhood, a constant reminder that nothing turned out right, not just for me but for anyone, and that's why someone had invented a saying like that. So we'd all know that we'd never have what we needed.

I kept myself to myself in the early years. I walked around and around the playground pretending to scale great mountain ranges or horizontal marshlands. In the summer months I sat beneath a sycamore tree on the edge of the school field. I collected insects in my hands only to release them at the end of playtime or lunch hour. Daddy asked me if I wanted an insect collecting set for my birthday or some jars to put them in to and take them home but I said I did not. I liked having them in my hands for that certain amount of time then letting them go off again into the undergrowth, back to their homes and to their lives. I would think about them living those lives while I sat back in my chair in the classroom and gazed blankly at times-tables.

I knew that the tears of adults were wetter, saltier, and much, much sadder than those of a child

I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen

I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn't understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once.

I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.

I liked all the children in my class. Back then, I think we all just tacitly assumed that we were equal. That we were all in the same boat. We didn’t really think about our different genders, races or classes. We just co-existed, like one big family.

I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.

I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.

I like the smell of my Grandma's soap - I used to sit in the bath and eat it.

I lived between my music and books, on the whole a rather unwholesome life for a boy to lead. I dwelt in a world of imagination, of dreams and air castles--the kind of atmosphere that sometimes nourishes a genius, more often men unfitted for the practical struggles of life.

I listened, while the scents found their hiding places in the cracks in the floorboards, and the words of the story, and the rest of my life.

I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it. Jean-Paul Sartre, Words

I looked out the window and saw the street and railroad tracks, the woods beyond. Beyond the woods, the county of which they were a part. And so on, until it all dissolved into the larger thing: my mother's house becoming every other house as I once had seen it, sitting atop the southern end of a broad river valley, close enough to the the mountains that every few years a scared black bear would wander down into the remaining forest, and close enough to the ocean that those early English settlers took it as the farthest point they'd go upstream, the geology of the place preventing them from having any choice other than the one wherein they said, "We are lost; therefore we will call this home." And close enough that as a child I had been teased by older kids who said if I only tried hard enough I would smell salt water, and I, believing, stood among the light poles and the gulls in the parking lots of A&Ps and cried when I knew that it was true despite the fact that they had meant to lie, as children sometimes do.

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

I love to help children's souls shine.

Il se laissait assoupir dans des odeurs de camphre et d'amandiers. Parfois, dans le calme de la nuit, il éprouvait la nostalgie du passé. Quand on évoquait devant lui l'adolescent rêvant à de fabuleux trésors, croyant à un destin extraordinaire, il ne se reconnaissait pas dans ce portrait. Il lui fallut beaucoup de temps avant de prêter à ces moments d'égarement les audaces délicieuses de la jeunesse.

Imagine, pretend, and play so you can become anyone you want to be. You don't need to be afraid.

I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things.

I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.

I met Baba Yaga at the end of childhood – past pigtails and fairytales, but not quite ready to give up on make-believe.

I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." ... I wonderes if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

I missed my mother and Elysius. It wasn't that I wanted them with me at that very moment. I wanted them in the past. I wanted to have back just one sunny afternoon together.

I miss those childish days of long ago, when one day was as long as twenty are now ...

I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life.

In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love. But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves. In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning.

I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage.

I mostly felt fortunate, to have lived here, in this house, in this town, with this family and these parents, and tried to think of all the things that had influenced me along the way.

I'm very happy that you did not marry Leighton or Tommy or any of the woefully lacking others, Sixpence." No one but Michael had ever called her Sixpence, a silly nickname he'd given her a lifetime ago, assuring her that she was worth far more than a penny to him.

In an instant he forgot Joe's poem about Japan except the part about 'you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,' and a new sound entered his life, like when he was a kid and he first heard the sound of horses clip-clopping and he asked his mother in wonder, "What's that sound, because I've never heard it before?

In childhood we inhabit a world of wonderful contrasts that later we often come to see as bizarre and do our best to rearrange, with everything in its 'proper' place. Unusual juxtapositions we label surrealistic. Yet what is surrealism but a second childhood with Freudian overtones which we have to be re-educated to enjoy? -- part of the tragedy of growing up

Increasingly, the girl child is becoming an endangered specie as pedophiles’ continue to roam free in our societies terrorizing the lives of our children and stripping them of all the joy and excitement that comes with childhood.

I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words. But I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

I never felt more free in this world, than when I was five years old

I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.

I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that if I didn't exist, the family would be better off. I grew up believing that if I had never been born, things would be easier for the people I loved. (page 35)

In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts.

In a way I haven't quite stopped mourning the end of my childhood.

In a polished surface of metal I happen to notice my reflected face; it wears a pale, beaten lonely look, eyes looking out at nothing with an expression of fear, frightened and lonely in a nightmare world. Something, I don’t know what, makes me think of my childhood; I remember myself as a schoolchild sitting at a hard wooden desk, and then as a little girl with thick, fair, wind-tossed hair, feeding the swans in a park. And it seems both strange and sad to me that all those childish years were spent in preparation for this – that, forgotten by everybody, with a beaten face, I should serve machinery in a place far away from the sun.

In one terrible instant, that terrible thing happened, the single most tragic experience of my, and just about any, childhood: boredom.

In order to be sure that she would not lose him in the shadows, she had assigned him a corner of the bedroom, the only one where he would be safe from the dead people who wandered through the house after sundown. "If you do anything bad", Ursula would tell him, "the saints will let me know". The terror-filled nights of his childhood were reduced to that corner where he would remain motionless until it was time to go to bed, perspiring with fear on a stool under the watchful and glacial eyes of the tattletale saints.

In our folk nobody has any experience of youth, there’s barely even any time for being a toddler. The children simply don’t have any time in which they might be children........Indeed... there’s simply no way that we would be able to provide our children with a viable childhood, one that is real. Naturally, there are consequences. There’s a certain ever present, not to be liquidated childishness that permeates our folk; We often act in ways that are totally and utterly ridiculous and, indeed, precisely like children we do things that are crazy, letting loose with our assets in a manner that is bereft of all rationality, prodigious in our celebrations, partaking in a light-headed frivolousness that is divorced from all sensibility, and often enough all simply for the sake of some small token of fun, so much do we love having our small amusements. But our folk isn’t only childish, to a certain extent we also age prematurely, childhood and old age mix themselves differently with us than by others. We don’t have any youth, we jump right away into maturity and, then, we remain grown-ups for too long and as a consequence to this there’s a broad shadow of a certain tiredness and a sort of hopelessness that colours our essential nature, a nature that as a whole is otherwise so tenacious and permeated by hope, strong hope. This, no doubt, this is related to why we’re so disinclined toward music—we’re too old for music, so much excitement, so much passion doesn’t sit well with our heaviness;

In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own experience. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same.

In some ways, forcing me to leave was the best thing that could have happened to me. In other ways, it was a disaster. I'm still glad they did it though, because I think I might have just died if I had stayed at the coast. Although I ended up there a couple years later, when my mother relapsed on a whim, I think I needed that two years away from that horrible little coastal town where time is frozen and ideas creep forward too slow to notice any progress.

Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.