My dad had limitations. That’s what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.

Summer days, and the flat water meadows and the blue hills in the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish...

Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life. . . . Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he’d been a boy.

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.

When I was a little kid I had a very different meaning of life; simple like a cup of tea with sugar and a piece of cake, today the whole world doesn’t give me that...

Resting on the roots of this old oak I lean back against his knotted trunk, shine my granny smith on my sleeve And ponder the days…

Be nice to your children. They may grow up to be writers.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.

You see, here’s my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father’s love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to...

At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. ‘Yum!’ he’d say, and ‘Charcoal! Good for you!’ and ‘Burnt toast! My favorite!’ and he’d eat it all up. When I was much...

Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother’s love – the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through...

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,...

Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.

I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of...

I have been so very, very fortunate in my life. I’ve met or been in contact with several of my childhood heroes. I’ve interacted with people all over this planet, and even though I couldn’t...

To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life of the child grows out of the life of the parent or as...

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.

They say a happy childhood is a lousy preparation for life. Kids who spend their playground days fat, ginger or gay know the truth.

We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see...

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from...

All infants and children require and deserve comfort in order to develop properly. Soft cooing voices, gentle touch, smiles, cleanliness, and wholesome food all contribute to the growing body/mind. And when these basic conditions are...

Yo había crecido en el convencimiento de que aquella lenta procesión de la posguerra, un mundo de quietud, miseria y rencores velados, era tan natural como el agua del grifo, y que aquella tristeza muda...

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If...

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

You can’t love your mother or father if you don’t also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.

A shaft of sunlight pierced the dark cluds and she looked up to see a silver lining. It was a sign, she thought.

not about my popularity. People have been supporting me since my childhood. They are supporting me because they want a change not about my popularity.

But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a...

Some veil between childhood and the present is necessary. If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies, the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes...

The adult were once young.The young have not yet attained adulthood.The young must learn to appreciate the wisdom of elderly people and learn from their life experiences.

What a tremendous power one needs to become his own master!

In the jumbled, fragmented memories I carry from my childhood there are probably nearly as many dreams as images from waking life. I thought of one which might have been my earliest remembered nightmare. I...

DEAR MISS MANNERS:I a tired of being treated like a child. My father says it’s because I am a child–I am twelve-and-a-half years old–but it still isn’t fair. If I go into a store to...

Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

What you knew in your childhood is true; the Otherworld of magic and enchantment is real, sometimes terribly real – and certainly more real than the factual reality which our culture has built up, brick...

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood

I had a series of childhood illnesses; scarlet fever, pneumonia, polio. I walked with braces until I was at least nine years old. My life wasn’t like the average person who grew up and decided...

It’s remarkable the logic we’ll build around a misapprehension.

Father never approved of my toysSaw them as child’s playthingsI was a childThey were my worldI ruled thereAnd he stepped on themDestroying themAnd in turnDestroyed meI should have been left to playNow I must step...

It’s funny how when you’re little, you miss all the little lies. They float right past you, but you don’t wonder about them much. For a long time, you think this is just something adults...

We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze.

I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn’t understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who...

Tiddlywinks, tiddlywinks, I want to play tiddlywinks,” chanted Ramona, shaking her head back and forth.