Best 2381 quotes in «childhood quotes» category

Ficámos de novo sem assunto. Olhei à minha volta. O branco é triste como o negro, nunca antes o tinha sentido. (...) Não lhe acariciei a mão, nem lhe pus a minha sobre a testa, num gesto de consolação. Não fiz nada disso. E devia-o ter feito. Mas que a tristeza me dominou, que apeteceu chorar, por ver o meu pai tão doente, isso era verdade. Ele tê-lo-ia compreendido? Decerto é ilusão julgarmos que outras pessoas podem compartilhar dos nossos sentimentos através de simples palavras. Se eu dissesse que vejo na memória um homem encolhido na cadeira, metido num fato largo demais como se não pertencesse, com as mãos amarelo torcidas sobre o ventre e o olhar fixo no chão, alguém o verá como eu o vi?

Films, photos, books, clothes, music... it's all so simple at face value, but it has the incredible power to make us nostalgic for earlier eras we never grew up in.

Forgetting the injustices and seeming injustices which one suffered from one's parents during childhood and youth must be the major part of any maturing process.

Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That 'Builds Character.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?

...for if we try to go on protecting them we prevent them from growing up to be ordinary, confident adults, capable of looking after themselves.

For many of us, the curtain has just come down on childhood.

FORKED BRANCHES We grew up on the same street, You and me. We went to the same schools, Rode the same bus, Had the same friends, And even shared spaghetti With each other's families. And though our roots belong to The same tree, Our branches have grown In different directions. Our tree, Now resembles a thousand Other trees In a sea of a trillion Other trees With parallel destinies And similar dreams. You cannot envy the branch That grows bigger From the same seed, And you cannot Blame it on the sun's direction. But you still compare us, As if we're still those two Kids at the park Slurping down slushies and Eating ice cream. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.

For the first time I envisaged the idea that we - that is, our family - were not the only people in the world, that not every conceivable interest was centered in ourselves but that there existed another life - that of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing for us, had no idea of our existence even. I must have known all this before but I had not known it as I did now - I had not realized it; I had not felt it.

For the first time I realized I could be more than a crawling little pile of bones and flesh in a onesie.

For,the heart of a child ,pleases God;untouched by praise or criticism.

For years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at the university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn't want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult.

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

For him, it appeared he could freeze the moment in a memory; only for it to slip through his hands like water.

Frog Princess loved the lilly flowers where Green Frog lay dreaming away the hours

From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.

From New Year's Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew quiet, as if all the people had disappeared.

From sunrise to sunset, I was in the forest, sometimes far from the house, with my goat who watched me as a mother does a child. All the animals in the forest became my friends, even dangerous and poisonous ones. Thanks to my goat-mother and my Indian nurse, I have always enjoyed the trust of animals--a precious gift. I still love animals infinitely more than human beings.

From both my families, I've learnt important things. From my family of chance, I learnt what it was like to be alone and unrecognized, to be perceived through the prism of delusion, a lost soul marooned in the belly of bedlam. I learned the beauty and power of language, but also its capacity for subtle perfidy, how it can be used to subvert and distort reality, to sanction cruelty and sugarcoat abuse. I learned that words can be the path to freedom or just another lock on the caged door. And from my family of choice, I learn on a daily basis about love and loyalty, about burdens shared and intimacies treasured, about forgiveness and atonement and joy. I learn about the gift of a difficult childhood and the fact that ''it's never too late to have a happy one.

Friends are a wonderful thing. They won't make you feel like a nothing.

From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.

Furthermore, the controlling caregiver possesses poor boundaries, if they have any at all. These poor boundaries set the child up for numerous failures in adult life. The controlled child is like a chess piece or toy soldier who is constantly moved around, picked up, put down, ordered to do this, ordered not to do that, commanded to feel this, and commanded not to feel that.

Ghosts are not what I remember of my childhood; but somehow they infuse memories of myself as a child, the little girl in a storybook, with ghosts hovering around her.

Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.

Gabriela's pupils were immoveable tempests, dark tunnels spiraling down into invisibility, terrifying the mother. They sat still amongst the greenish-brown puddle and attacked Estefania in total muteness.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.