Best 2381 quotes in «childhood quotes» category

Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are heavily influenced by this.

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.

Hannah ran past, beaming. I remember that feeling--when you're a kid and it's your birthday and for one day everyone makes you feel like the most special person in the world.

Happiness is a consolation for those who cannot orgasm yet … or anymore.

Hard for Bunny who still measured events on a child's scale of fair and unfair.

Harry was a bright boy. And like many bright boys, he had a little mischief in him.

Have you ever loved someone so intensely, so entirely ,that it's painful to be apart from them? I'm not talking about being in a long-distance relationship or even a particularly painful case of unrequited love. I'm talking about being in a completely different world from the other person, a world where you can see them and hear them but you can't touch them and they can't see or hear you.

Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism.

Healthy boys grow into healthy men.

He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.

he child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a small child absorbs form and colour. Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will - a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood's capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.

He considered himself, and the way he moved in reaction, like a pinball, from one thing to the next, as he was told, as was expected, as made the least friction, and he knew this was the lazy behavior of a scared boy.

He'd unbuttoned his shirt so the night breeze would soothe him; his body always ran too hot. The blood. Too hot. The large, gold crucifix on his neck, dangling to his thick chest hairs, caught there, and winked in the candlelight. His childhood prayers. For food. Warmth. His beloved mother. That the cruelty of his father. Stop. No more. Beatings. He never. Stopped. Beating her. Mama. [...] Pompeii remembered - like tuning into a clear TV channel - his mother's gentle face. Her fingertips on his boy's face, calming him to sleep. The sound of his father's drunken entrance, when she would hold her breath, stop stroking his boy face.

He didn't want to play football. He wanted to be told the truth.

He gave each wolf its own name, and he told me that they were crossing the Moon River, a place that he said, “Is where all wolves go when they die.

He had been haunted his whole life by a mild case of claustrophobia—the vestige of a childhood incident he had never quite overcome. Langdon’s aversion to closed spaces was by no means debilitating, but it had always frustrated him. It manifested itself in subtle ways. He avoided enclosed sports like racquetball or squash, and he had gladly paid a small fortune for his airy, high-ceilinged Victorian home even though economical faculty housing was readily available. Langdon had often suspected his attraction to the art world as a young boy sprang from his love of museums’ wide open spaces.

He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, somehow. But the PROCESS – how he put together a story about the world’s workings – that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more PART of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be opaque as a rock.

He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of make believe.

He liked the fog, the world quietened down and closed in. Glossy turned to matt, every stridency was muted, substance leached out of the brute matter all around. Things became notions, the brash present a vague memory. By some parallel process of slippage, his innumerable childhood memories of foggy days morphed into other memories. The fog of illness, real or feigned, of fevers and flu and febrility.

Her own dolls were either babies or storybook characters like Cinderella and Snow White who though past childhood were somehow not yet into the world, girls who kept themselves apart from the world without really knowing what for. Now girls know what for. They menstruate when they are ten, and their dolls are sluts.

Here is the voice of my main Character in my Talon book series, I’ll let her introduce herself to you: My name is Matica and I am a special needs child with a growth disability. I am stuck in the body of a two year old, even though I am ten years old when my story begins in the first book of the Talon series, TALON, COME FLY WITH ME. Because of that disability, (I am saying ‘that’ disability, not ‘my’ disability because it’s a thing that happens to me, nothing more and because I am not accepting it as something bad. I can say that now after I learned to cope with it.) I was rejected by the local Indians as they couldn’t understand that that condition is not a sickness and so it can’t be really cured. It’s just a disorder of my body. But I never gave up on life and so I had lots of adventures roaming around the plateau where we live in Peru, South America, with my mother’s blessings. But after I made friends with my condors I named Tamo and Tima, everything changed. It changed for the good. I was finally loved. And I am the hero and I embrace my problem. In better words: I had embraced my problem before I made friends with my condors Tamo and Tima. I held onto it and I felt sorry for myself and cried a lot, wanting to run away or something worse. But did it help me? Did it become better? Did I grow taller? No, nothing of that helped me. I didn’t have those questions when I was still in my sorrow, but all these questions came to me later, after I was loved and was cherished. One day I looked up into the sky and saw the majestic condors flying in the air. Here and now, I made up my mind. I wanted to become friends with them. I believed if I could achieve that, all my sorrow and rejection would be over. And true enough, it was over. I was loved. I even became famous. And so, if you are in a situation, with whatever your problem is, find something you could rely on and stick to it, love that and do with that what you were meant to do. And I never run from conflicts.

Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone.

He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down. 'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?

He stared at the corner of the yellowed ceiling, at the spider web and its solitary occupant. “Why here?” he asked the spider. “You could choose anywhere instead of this house. I know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be.” The spider said nothing. Come to think of it, Callum was sure the spider hadn’t moved even an inch in the last week. Maybe it was dead. Dead and crisp like the untouched wasp carcass on his window sill.

He listens to her stories, really listens. Later he tucks her in, traces a cursive message on her bare back when she can't sleep: I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.

Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her was like a grandmother who had used up all her stories and now simply rocked on the porch. The same flowers, the same streets, year after year. She longed for someone more exotic. A prince. A pirate.

Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

He’s completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly.

He’s just a boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be king

He told me that the phrase “the happiest days of your life” referred to your school days. This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children.

He was a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. When we played, his child's heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed and mothers and fathers were dim and far away--too far away to ever reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal--would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard.

He was a bad, bad bastard. He abused the privilege of being a cunt, as my old Da would say.’ I smiled, picturing the cozy fireside scene of young son on father’s knee being inducted into the world of abusive epithets.

He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves.

He was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window.

High school will probably be better. I mean, some kids will still be jerks, but it's not so bad if you have at least one good friend. Someone who gets you.

HEY NERD BOY! I KNOW YOU THINK YOU'RE SOMEHOW BEING MADE FUN OF, BUT THAT GIRL IS GENUINELY REACHING OUT TO YOU! YOU KNOW ABOUT FRIENDS, RIGHT? INSTEAD OF CONDESCENDING TO HER IN A PREEMPTIVE SHIELDING OF YOUR BRUISED AND BATTERED EGO, MAYBE JUST TALK TO HER ABOUT THE BOOK YOU BOTH LIKE? DO THIS NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE AND YOU'RE WRITING A COMIC TO DEAL WITH ALL THESE FEELINGS YEARS LATER!

How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing.

His mother's name was Rose, and when he was big enough to tie his shoes and stop wetting the bed, he was going to marry her.

Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason. The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless. Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.

Honour looked so much like a child herself, confined to bed, a white nightgown, like one of those maudlin Victorian dolls. Her cheeks were red, like someone had painted them, but I knew it was from rubbing, wiping away her melancholy.

How beautiful it is to feel that what you cannot describe?

How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal farther?

How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?

How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

Hoy, cuando todo el mundo escribe para los niños, seria una buena idea hacer, por una ver, un libro escrito por los niños para las personas mayores. Pero la cosa es difícil, si hay que permanecer en el caracter

I am an atheist on a mission to fulfill the commandment of Jesus Christ in Matthew 18: 2-6. If you believe Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior you are aware that repenting for the sin of 'IGNORING' the world's 'CHILDREN' is fatuous.

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera. Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the "forests of symbols." (The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)

I am not sure that you can be taught how to love. In many ways it is innate - just watch and see what small child effortlessly does. But you can be reminded of it and invited to it and reminded of it.

I am not my mother. I love her, but I am not her.