Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small...

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...

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

When I write…I am in the fond armsof a childhood friendupon whose colorful heart I can hang the charcoal drawingsof my woes.

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…

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful....

Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.

Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.

Over the years our mother has beaten us with belts, shoes, rulers, extension cords, hair brushes, a wooden spoon, a fly swatter, a toilet brush, wire coat hangers, wooden coat hangers and sometimes one of...

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the ‘walks’ of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

Kids never jumped head first from the top ledge. Never. It seemed forever beforeStoney came back to the surface. Most of the white bubbles had already disappeared.

I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper. And, of course, after that it’s just a small step to full-blown sociopath.

The monsters were never under our bed, but in the forest our future.

To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.

That’s the beautiful thing about innocence; even monsters have a pocketful of childhood memories with which to seek comfort with.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a...

I never thought to ascribe my mother’s emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact...

I think repressing what happened is what saved me in my childhood. I was able to use my imagination to create happy events, but a little girl can carry only so much on her own.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

Parent should never forget the great excitement they felt for the birth of a new born into the world.

The greatest memories a person might have in their life is, childhood. It’s really a painful nostalgia.

As my children leave the protected parameters of the bay called childhood and enter the wavier seas of adolescence, I’m starting to get seasick.

There is no land like the land of your childhood.

She said, “Daddy thinks that all the world’s magic is almost evolved out.”I thought of Roebuck Lake, its swamps and sloughs and loblollies and breaks of cypress and cane, its sunken treetops and stobs and...

Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was...

I came because I’ve spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it’s too late, before we’re...

and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.

Never stop screaming, playing and laughing, it’s part of our childhood wich will always be with us.

I feel like my imagination was crafted by Tolkien. He seemed to tap into that childhood intrigue of secret doors and hidden worlds.

It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.

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

Parts of my 20s and 30s have gone by in a flash but my childhood is with me all the time.

They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.

Play is the highest form of research.

No child should ever be too sad to play.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find...

If we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger.

On some days she was able to see both sun and moon at the same time. Like feuding cousins, they hung in two corners of the vast world-ceiling refusing to look at one another. The...

Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.

Don’t you find it odd,” she continued, “that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water–it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom...

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.

…but even Peter Pan had to grow up one day.

Look at me!” he would shout as he ran laughing through the halls of Storm’s End. “Look at me, I’m a dragon,” or “Look at me, I’m a wizard,” or “Look at me, look at...

It’s hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.

Ô maudite enfance, qui ne veut pas mourir !

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose...

Yet I had become very attached to George Roc. I liked him, not for the joy of playing with him, not for some talent that made him stand out from the rest, not even for...

Every summer, like the roses, childhood returns.

Vivien thought how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn’t know the first thing about being brave.