Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

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

[On his childhood] One morning I woke up and found my favorite pigeon, Julius, had died I was devastated and was gonna use his crate as my stickball bat to honor him. I left the...

You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a...

It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.

Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became...

I am a citizen of the world. Some of my best friends are black, including those I had from childhood. The fact that I made a joke in order to motivate a player has nothing...

There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

We are very concerned with the level of childhood obesity, … We don’t want this generation of young people to live fewer years than their parents.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

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

Childhood is this time of magic and monsters; hoping for one and fearing the other… The worst part of being a kid is discovering which one exists… So, I chose to believe in magic.

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we...

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. ♥

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

The nutcracker sits under the holiday tree, a guardian of childhood stories. Feed him walnuts and he will crack open a tale…

The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.

When you’re a kid, you tend to see the best in your mates. Because at least they’re not as bad as your parents.

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her...

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

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

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older.

These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and...

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...

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,...

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a childhood that was _not_ like mine. I have no real frame of reference, but when I question strangers I’ve found that their childhood...

Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in...

Do you remember the books from our childhood? Those were you could decide yourself what the character should do next?I always loved those books, getting to decide what will happen, being responsible for it.But did...

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

A child can die even in the safest place on earth- its mother’s womb!

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and...

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Nothing is more foreign than the world of one’s childhood when one has truly left it.

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...

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.

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...

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find...

We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them.

Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made...

I have no complaints with the whole childhood acting thing, because I wanted to do it.

Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same...

I think the closest thing to a time machine that I’ve ever found is the Children’s section of a library.

No teacher has the right to cure a child of making noises on a drum. The only curing that should be practiced is the curing of unhappiness.

It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the...