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...

The older I get the more I enjoy my childhood…! ~James A. Murphy

I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.

In the tell-me-again times, (…) when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud, a...

I still think that, in a way, I can’t get past half my childhood dogmas.

[…] I grew up out of that strange, dreamy childhood of mine and went into the world of reality. I met with experiences that bruised my spirit – but they never harmed my ideal world....

And what do I know about humans? Only this: My name is Doloria Maria de la Cruz, and I’m not just the end of childhood. I’m the end of humanity. And if you come from...

The best way to teach a child is live an exemplary life.

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother’s plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that...

[Kids] don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.

And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.

I had a wonderful childhood, which is tough because it’s hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood.

If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter.

Life is ironic. Some people use their terrible childhood as an excuse of their unfortunate rest of the life… while others create a masterpiece out of their terrible childhood, they create a story loved by...

As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole...

It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.

I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I – supposed fruit of their love – no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me nothing is sadder...

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

Young children begin very early to internalize information that either encourages or discourages self-disclosure. Cues are intuitively understood. Most of what we feel is unexamined and articulated. Cultural norms are unwittingly absorbed. We learn when...

Why could this darkness rip the gloominess around meHad an unknown reason of being fearful for so longThinking, if its touched by these horrendous windsWill unleash my sorrowful side & my mood swings!Aesthetically pleasing it...

Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole...

They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary...

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is...

it’s definitely best for little children to have a regular life, especially if they can regulate it themselves.

I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms,...

The child is not a citizen of the future; he (sic) is a citizen from the very first moment of life and also the most important citizen because he represents and brings the ‘possible’…a bearer,...

Given that the biggest rise in childhood obesity rates are occurring in children ages 3 to 5 years, we must modify our efforts to place an emphasis on prevention versus intervention.

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn’t want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this was the Middle Ages, you’d be married and...

My mother is European and expresses her love through food and cuddling. She wasn’t the type of mother who would make it to school plays or soccer games, but if you wanted to stay at...

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .

the imagination of a child is the most precious gift we can share

Ficámos de novo sem assunto. Olhei à minha volta. O branco é triste como o negro, nunca antes o tinha sentido. (…) Não lhe acariciei a mão, nem lhe pus a minha sobre a testa,...

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

The increasingly thoughtful child can see the whole horribly upset world and would be understandably totally bewildered and deeply troubled by it

Soon never comes soon enough to a young child.

I was one of the many kids in Northern Ireland who grew up in the countryside and had an idyllic childhood well away from the Troubles.

I would trade everything I have to have had a happier childhood.

In silence the three of them looked at the sunset and thought about God.

The Unexpected GiftTorn asunder from her slumberin the hour of half past threeThe child knew the tyrannical regimeand followed instinctively.-(slice from Enigmatic Evolution)

Looking’ his last’ upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing ‘she’ could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going...

My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in...

The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun islike a yellow hole. . .

I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our...

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.