Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There’s a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ♥

From New Year’s Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew quiet, as if all the people had disappeared.

The nutcracker sits under the holiday tree, a guardian of childhood stories. Feed him walnuts and he will crack open a tale…

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the...

Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.

If you ever want to see heaven, watch a bunch of young girls play. They are all sweat and skinned knees. Energy and open faces.

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.

Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then...

There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And...

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day,...

…my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks,...

The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.

She tried so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all.

Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

I met Baba Yaga at the end of childhood – past pigtails and fairytales, but not quite ready to give up on make-believe.

[On his childhood] One morning I woke up and found my favorite pigeon, Julius, had died I was devastated and was gonna use his crate as my stickball bat to honor him. I left the...

You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a...

It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.

A child can die even in the safest place on earth- its mother’s womb!

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and...

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Nothing is more foreign than the world of one’s childhood when one has truly left it.

She had felt good for a few moments, racing across the face of the hill on her old bike, but the happy feeling had burned itself out and left behind a thin, cold rage. She...

Being a child is such a shining gift, yet we don’t know how precious it is until it’s worn out and gone away.

Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and...

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find...

We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them.

Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made...

I have no complaints with the whole childhood acting thing, because I wanted to do it.

The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.

When you’re a kid, you tend to see the best in your mates. Because at least they’re not as bad as your parents.

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her...

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That ‘Builds Character.

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older.

These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and...

I have heard it said that a happy childhood is a curse, because what follows can never measure up. All I can say is, those people must want too much; they can’t accept that life...

He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar,...

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a childhood that was _not_ like mine. I have no real frame of reference, but when I question strangers I’ve found that their childhood...

Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in...

Do you remember the books from our childhood? Those were you could decide yourself what the character should do next?I always loved those books, getting to decide what will happen, being responsible for it.But did...

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

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.