The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great...

I sailed through my childhood with a complete lack of any drama.

Increasingly, the girl child is becoming an endangered specie aspedophiles’ continue to roam free in our societies terrorizingthe lives of our children and stripping them of all the joy andexcitement that comes with childhood.

Tender Ember…Barred and brandedto be forever unlovedI was a tender emberseeking solace from above…

Tom’s whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.

Tentei não fazer nada na minha vida que envergonhasse a criança que fui.Quando me for deste mundo, partirão duas pessoas. Sairei de mão dada, com essa criança que fui.

For a lot of my childhood, I didn’t want to direct movies because I didn’t really know what directing was.

An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.

The move towards the extension of personhood to children is already underway, and is utterly, completely and totally unstoppable!

One day I had nothing but my childhood to defend myself……….

I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I’d just been born?

Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God.

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts...

The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood

Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don’t get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives.

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...

And that’s when I heard the whisper in my heart’s ear: “It’s not about your childhood. It’s about who you are!

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had ‘given’ their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had...

He was a bad, bad bastard. He abused the privilege of being a cunt, as my old Da would say.’ I smiled, picturing the cozy fireside scene of young son on father’s knee being inducted...

I carry all of my childhood memories in my mind. But maybe that’s not the best place for them. Well, you’ve got some extra space in your closet. Do you think I could store them...

My childhood was full of deep sorrows — colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

It felt now as if I’d never known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away...

The door is crackedWe used to meetlike water does landnonot thatmore like when skin touches skinkissing fingertipsor when air escapes a lung and is felt across the worldI’ve leapt over cracks in sidewalksand swallowed away...

Peki, niçin bize en gizli sırrını açmıştı? Nedenini sordum. -Çünkü siz çocuksunuz. Anlarsınız.

I felt caged by my childhood.

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...

If you can’t find any fun during childhood, you naturally won’t look for it as you grow up to maturity. You will grow ‘hard,’ and look upon fun as foolish. Also, if you don’t furnish...

Children are good learners. The first learn to act what they hear and see.

Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?

The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child’s...

I tried to show him things, but he didn’t seem to study what I showed him. Usually, he just put whatever I handed him in his mouth. He would try to eat anything. I fed...

…after all, who isn’t a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and...

Si, bien avant la puberté, et parfois même dès sa toute petite enfance, elle nous apparaît déjà comme sexuellement specifiée, ce n’est pas que de mystérieux instincts immédiatement la vouent à la passivité, à la...

Only children simply accept the fact that their parents have the right to make choices for them. Even disobedient children never question the fact that their parents have that right. They may choose to flout...

. . . I suppose one starts out, as a child, being romantic and dreaming of adventure. Poetic. Then reality comes along, and with it, a whole lot of prose.

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

It’s not until you’re older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember.

I gave up on ever trying to get ‘my way.’ I barely knew it existed.

I’ve matured a lot. You can only stay mad so long. I think (his childhood) helped me to see how not to do it the right way and to try to do it better when...

You know, it’s a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens...

I don’t know where to start,” one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can....

Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair,...

Brushing my little teeth every morning of my childhood, I stood on my tippy toes, leaned over the sink and said to myself that when I am a big girl I will see from this...

Peter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it’s the book of my adulthood too. It’s a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to...

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?