All of us are products of our childhood.

I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I – supposed fruit of their love – no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me nothing is sadder than my parents’ divorce.

The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer.

Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured...

The things that have been told us in our childhoodAre not so fragile.

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this...

That I always had space to run and that I had the opportunity to play with my imagination. I also loved that my mum drew and painted with me. I always remember that my parents loved me, and that is essential when you’re a kid; they always showed me how proud they were of my...

and children are still the way you were …as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

That’s the most terrible thing about being a child; you’re convinced that it’s all your fault.” Lulu

What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because...

If your child is constantly interrupting or doing other things to get your attention, he is not getting enough communication of the right kind. Just the fact that you are in the house with him all day does not mean that you are necessarily devoting any time to communication of his choice.

It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.

Being a child is such a shining gift, yet we don’t know how precious it is until it’s worn out and gone away.

… be knygų jau nebegalėjau apsieiti. Ne tiek be knygų, kiek be paties skaitymo. Mano akys į nieką daugiau nenorėjo žiūrėti, jos tiesiog šaukte šaukė: ,,Duok mums raidžių!.. Duok mums raidžių!..” Nežinau, gal yra tokia skaitymo liga? Jei yra, tai aš ja susirgau vaikystėje, paskui ji perėjo į chronišką ir nebepagydomą. Tiesą pasakius, niekas jos...

…so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

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...

But I think parents aren’t teachers anymore. Parents — or a whole lot of us, at least — lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child’s hero is their mother or father — or even better, both of them in tandem — then the rough road of learning...

As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.

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

It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent...

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I...

I am extremely proud and honoured to have beaten Pete’s record as he was my childhood hero and I have always looked up to him.

But we left camp after a while and we was driving in a real spooky place cause all the roads up near camp are dark and in the woods and we had to drive for a while to get to a highway cause there was no street lights or anything and nothing but woods and...

Everyone has a childhood, everyone had awkward years and weird stages. Mine were broadcast for eight years.

Why could this darkness rip the gloominess around meHad an unknown reason of being fearful for so longThinking, if its touched by these horrendous windsWill unleash my sorrowful side & my mood swings!Aesthetically pleasing it is now, Couldn’t yearn for it to be any betterThis oasis of serenity though, I trust will cast away all...

I had a serious childhood illness – sort of like spinal meningitis – that led to a three-month hospitalization. Afterward, I couldn’t be insured because of a pre-existing condition.

We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze.

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

Forever…” The last syllable stretches, just like my grandfather’s dying breath.And the beady, black orbs are no longer eyes but deep, obsidian pits…

Childhood obesity is a real problem.

We grew up in a place without a hint of love. Perhaps this was the single thing that bound us forever.

My next memory is of waking up, it then being dark outside, and my brother and sister fast asleep on the couch. Sitting up I sensed something was broken. Maybe the night? It was open and alive with lights and noises and worried voices. The adults were up, and in and out: we were all...

Amidst the chaos of the cities, a part of you always yearns for the silence of the woods.

One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don’t know all, and what they do know, they often won’t tell you- because they’ve got their own agendas, or because they want to...

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

Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer.

E’ una bambina che è stata punita per la sua innocente superbia, una bambina che ha commesso l’errore di pensare di essere grande quando era piccola, di contare quando non valeva niente, di essere circondata dall’affetto del mondo quando in realtà il mondo non è che un enorme locomotore morto, con un motore ma senza...

Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.

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

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don’t realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out...

The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels – guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic...

An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.

Life is ironic. Some people use their terrible childhood as an excuse of their unfortunate rest of the life… while others create a masterpiece out of their terrible childhood, they create a story loved by the entire world.

Zen has been called the “religion before religion,” which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions...

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a...