Člověk se přirozeně nemůže od dětství osvobodit, aniž by se jím podrobně nezabýval, jak již dlouho víme z Freudových výzkumů. Čistě intelektuálním věděním přitom nelze ničeho dosáhnout. Účinné je pouze rozpomenutí se, které je zároveň...

I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days – All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

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

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used...

If we truly detach from our childhood and abandon our inherent romanticism, then we shred any bit of humanity left in us.

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

Next generations will not know what is to have childhood.

We commonly see problems in adults that had been present since childhood but which take a toll on the heart over time.

I never felt more free in this world, than when I was five years old

For a child, it is in the simplicity of play that the complexity of life is sorted like puzzle pieces joined together to make sense of the world.

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...

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel...

A tale is told of twin boys born to different mothers.One is dark by nature, the other light. One is rich, the other poor. One is harsh, the other gentle. One is forever youthful, the...

Later, when you’re grown up, you realize you never really get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that’s it.

And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the...

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from...

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.

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by...

Anger is the immune system of the soul.

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...

Not to grow up properly is to retain our ‘caterpillar’ quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us...

Most kids don’t give a hoot in hell for brains; they go a penny a pound, and the kid with the high I.Q. who can’t play baseball or at least come in third in the...

The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against...

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...

My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn’t bear to watch him leave with so much luggage.

Mom, how come you never go outside?””I told you, I’m a vampire.

Sometimes, as a great treat, I was allowed to remove Nursie’s snowy ruffled cap. Without it, she somehow retreated into private life and lost her official status. Then, with elaborate care, I would tie a...

I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like...

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely...

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough;...

Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet. Have you ever seen a baby...

I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were...

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

We’re children. We’re supposed to be childish.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

I’m not sure who invented dodgeball, but I can almost guarantee you that it wasn’t the shortest kid in the class.

cranky.” And big, gulping sobs, or sad, unhappy young minds, in a tiny body should not occur in any community of civilization. Adulthood holds many an opportunity for such conditions. Childhood should not.

Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on...

My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you, with no sign of motorway, freeway or highway.

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...

On some level, with its carrousels and castle and cowboys, its mysterious jungle and its animated characters, Disneyland is a highly idealized elaboration of our childhoods. It can be seen as a portal through which...

It’s what we’re all trying to do, right? Remember a time that was better. Re-create a moment of that memory as we let the crisp Coke bubble down our throats. Riding bikes on a summer...

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.

I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.

sir.” It just happens.These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I...

The poet believed that ‘Beauty’ first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The...

When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.

Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans’ earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding...

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...