Childhood Quotes - Page 11

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.

David Brooks

The reason any person yaks excessively is because his communication is not being adequately acknowledged. He just keeps trying to be heard.

Ruth Minshull

During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid wants to be.

Jennifer Senior

All fathers are liars . . . If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.

Alison Espach

There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misunderstood, in the ways that they treated me. At times, I had felt completely loved and accepted by my parents, but for one reason or another, they were unable to care for me, provide for me, in some ways that would have been very important. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to make up for the experiences in life that were absent when I was a child.

Jonathan Harnisch

I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up.

Ken Follett

I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.

Marian Wright Edelman

The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.

Kristen Crockett

... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.

Lev S. Vygotsky

I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now.

Crystal Woods

As for children's working off aggressions, I'm against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world. Name one great man in history who did not go boiling and bubbling through childhood with a lashed-down safety valve.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

Anne Rice

Some people discard their childhood like an old hat. They forget about it like a phone number that's no longer valid. They used to be kids, then they became adults - but what are they now?Only those who grow up but continue to be children are humans.

Erick Kästner

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.

Yolanda A. Reid

Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ♥

Susan Branch

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst.

Alice Munro

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

Jenny Han

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

Agatha Christie

For him, it appeared he could freezethe moment in a memory; only for it to slip through hishands like water.

J.U. Scribe

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.

Roman Payne

Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags

Jennifer E. Smith

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.

Matthew Flaming

But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn't have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclination

Dean Koontz

I would think of certain winter nights when he wedged himself between Nona and me in bed, a furtive warmth embedded in his skin already tinctured with virginal earth and milk and possibility, or how that peculiar scent common to all small children before the age of five--sunshine sweetened hair, a nascent woodsiness in him exuding youthful exuberance--gripped us, suspended us eighties in the sense that our hope, our very survival, depended on the fulfillment of this child's dreams. How I took those years I spent for granted, believing them unalterable? pg. 9

S.K. Kalsi

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

Dean Koontz

Every summer, like the roses, childhood returns.

Marty Rubin

A pure white puppy followed on the girl’s heels, barking, and the girl laughed in the breathless, drunken way of children as she ran into the hallway.

Kit Alloway

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

Willa Cather

Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.

Virginia Woolf

Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.

Gérard de Nerval

Years later, I remember the waxy taste of the yellow paint, the papery taste of splintered wood, the sharp metallic of the graphite.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Looking back into childhood is like turning a telescope the wrong way around. Everything appears in miniature, but with a clarity it probably does not deserve; moreover it has become concentrated and stylized, taking shape in symbolism. Thus it is that I sometimes see my infant self as having been set down before a blank slate on which to construct a map or schema of the external world, and as hesitantly beginning to sketch it, with many false starts and much rubbing-out, the anatomy of my universe. Happiness and sorrow, love and friendship, hostility, a sense of guilt and more abstract concepts still, must all find a place somewhere, much as an architect lays out the plan of a house he is designing - hall, dining-room and bedrooms - but must not forget the bathroom. In a child’s map, too, some of the rooms are connected by a serving-hatch, while others are sealed off behind baize doors. How can the fragments possibly be combined to make sense? Yet this map or finished diagram, constructed in the course of ten or twelve years’ puzzling, refuses to be ignored, and for some time to come will make itself felt as bones through flesh, to emerge as the complex organism which adults think of as their philosophy of life. Presumably it has its origins in both heredity and enviorment. So with heredity I shall begin.

Frances Partridge

I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren't called turtlenecks, I wouldn't have worn them.

Augusten Burroughs

The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them

Charles Dickens

This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes.

Nina LaCour

The ground was silvery, as if some stars had fallen there.

Heather O'Neill

The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood

Richard Paul Evans

What I most hate is the books and films and all other stuff which all the time end in happy end, do you hate it...It's better to be in happy and... - After all I wanted to show the taste of the real world, a injury in father's childhood, then injury when his wife dies...

Deyth Banger

Katja kneeled in the Parisian streets, shaking and weak from the pain in her head and heart. It had come a second ago—a vague vision from another decade, nearly forgotten by its sender and screaming with emotional turmoil. And only moments after she‟d fed. In the now decrepit walls of a place she once knew, she stared down at a child in despair. In the room where a man breathed his last and a young woman‟s sorrow grew, he lay weeping in a rage only the heart of all sorrow can know. Death and fear came off of him in waves as lightning shared the secret of the man inside the child—the man who would be her beginning and her end if she allowed it.

Amanda M. Lyons

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society.

George Eliot

...my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room ... I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun.

Gillian Flynn

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.

Joe Hill

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

Shogo Oketani

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts.

Jerry Spinelli

Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely.

Margaret Atwood

Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

Heather O'Neill

And now the bad Mommy was here – outside his window. With a little whimper, he ran back to the bed, jumped in, and pulled the covers over his head.Good Mommy was gone now…and bad Mommy had come to eat him up.

Alan Kinross

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

Stephen King

It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother's face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again...

Marcel Proust

The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto's shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago he'd been a kid, thinking about his nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and signs. Now he was, heavy, adult.

Lauren Groff

If I'd been a cowboy, it might've ended well.Somewhere on the ramble, I'm sure I'd have to sellMy guns along the highway. My coins to the table To make a gambler's double, I'd double debts to pay.Prob'ly shrink and slink away, It mightn't've ended well.What If I'd been a sailor? I think it might've ended well.From August to MayFor a searat of man drifting through eternal blue, aboard the finest Debris.I might've called the shanties. From daybreak to storm's set, lines stay Taught, over rhythm unbroken.But, oh, there's a schism unspoken, a mighty calling of the lee.An absentminded Pirate, unaccustomed to the sea;To the land, a traitor. I think it mightn't've ended well. What might've worked for me? What might've ended well?Soldier, to bloody sally forth through hell?Teacher of glorious stories to tell?Man of gold, or stores to sell?Lover to a gentle belle? Maybe a camel;A seashell.What mightn't've been a life where it mightn't've ended well?

Dylan Thomas McCall

Later in the night, Nell brought two of the company mutts up from the stables. It took her almost an hour to find the horses, and more time to find the stall where the dogs had been penned. Then she lost her way coming back through the endless corridors and the mutts tried to bite an Ordinary.Everything is an adventure when you're a page.

Miles Cameron

These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the micro landscapes of their own grazed knees; put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing and they could find their way out without putting a foot wrong. This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams.

Tana French

Capture your youth, while you can.

Anthony Liccione

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

Ruth Ozeki

Those of us who have overcome so many adversities from a very young age, are privileged to be able to communicate profound insights and advice to others, speaking from a place of genuine confidence and knowing.

Miya Yamanouchi

But the world hinges on good fathers and those who would be the merchants of confidence.

Michelle Franklin

Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.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. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.

Armistead Maupin

Previous 1 … 9 10 11 12 13 … 19 Next

Childhood Quotes - Page 11

Related Topics