I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos, I’m in fancy dress, playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.

The fantasy of childhood, amazing optimism .

You ain’t old yet but when you get old, all the women in the village start to look down on you when they find out you want to do something other than sweep the kitchen...

Meadow’s Waltz…the meadow had becomeher sanctuary of spiritoffering an escape from a painno child should ever endureforeboding clouds began…

The darling mispronunciations of childhood! – dear me, there’s no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear...

That night, Gregory dreamt of his mother. It was a dream that he’d have carried to his therapist like a raw, precious egg if he’d had a therapist, and the dream made him wish he...

…even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed.

Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the...

A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It’s scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you’re...

That’s the most terrible thing about being a child; you’re convinced that it’s all your fault.” Lulu

With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before—simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he...

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the...

A person’s integrity develops early in life. Once formed, it is difficult to alter, change, or improve.

Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.

Was it magic? Of course it was.

That’s what makes it so right. Your eyes—your soul is there, but the rest of you is still so undefined. That’s the beauty of childhood. The eyes show everything you’ve seen so far, but the...

Throughout my entire miserable childhood I woke at least once a night weeping from overwhelming delight. I did it hungry, I did it after beatings, I did it after the deaths of loved ones.Now you...

Here is the door of my mom’s house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together...

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns...

My mother would say, ‘Why are you always playing alone?’ And I would say, ‘I’m not playin’, Ma. I’m fuckin’ serious!

Adoption isn’t just a childhood experience, it’s a life-long experience.

As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula.

I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.

Thought you could kill my Snow-on-the-Mountain, did you? Well, Jessie says that the top’s growing back out. Next time you’ll know how to do it right, won’t you? You’ll pull it up by the roots,...

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Once upon a time she had liked to dance. When she had been about the same age as the little brunette out there who kept lifting her dress up over her head. Now that was...

… I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so...

Every child born into the world has a divine mission to fulfill.As the child grows into adulthood, he or she must act to fulfill the divine mission.

O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys

We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory.

In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own...

It’s one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.

You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.

It didn’t matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.No he isn’t, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending...

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

En tant qu’il existe pour soi l’enfant ne saurait se saisir comme sexuellement différencié. (…) C’est à travers les yeux, les mains, non par les paties sexuelles qu’ils appréhendent l’univers.

Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought...

I remember the pain I felt, and wonder why a man who was such an accomplished liar had to tell the truth that day.

There’s a great power of imagination about these little creatures, and a creative fancy and belief that is very curious to watch . . . I am sure that horrid matter-of-fact child-rearers . . ....

I’m in my 40s and I’m constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life.

The little room was full of ordinary things that had already become precious, that I couldn’t help but want to have again, to feel like whoever it was I used to be, whether it was...

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

It seemed I’d always been chasing after something, anything that moved -a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not...

Era um dos efeitos colaterais da juventude: sair da inocência e ingenuidade da inf ncia e cair na alienação umbigocêntrica daquela fase em que acreditamos que já somos adultos. Mas é somente isso, achismo e...

People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother’s house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.

When I was a teenager, I thought nothing would ever happen to me because my childhood was so normal. I had this complex of normality.

Say what you will, dear sister, we do what we do for the promise of our youth. Yet it is always they who scar beneath the points of daggers.

Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don’t bite people, because people don’t have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And...

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as...

To Alef, the letterthat begins the alphabetsof both Arabic and Hebrew-two Semitic languages,sisters for centuries.May we find the languagethat takes usto the only home there is – one another’s hearts….Alef knowsThat a threadOf a storyStitches...