He was a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. When we played, his child’s heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went...

The poor lads called and called, but they were grown and had forgotten the best places to hide.

The Children’s HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,That is known as the Children’s Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little...

Hann var bara að komast á þann aldur, þegar barnið sofnar djúpt inní manni og hjá sumum vaknar það aldrei aftur. Ekki í þessu lífi. Svoleiðis fólk gengur því með dáið barn inní sér. Og...

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we’re growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free...

I looked out the window and saw the street and railroad tracks, the woods beyond. Beyond the woods, the county of which they were a part. And so on, until it all dissolved into the...

I’ve loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn’t change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child....

In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit...

The world would be a brighter, happier place, if we could only remember our childhood wonder.

Family is not disparate relationships between individuals and machines, in separate rooms of a house. Childhood is not a race to accumulate all of the consumer goods and stresses of adulthood in record time. Simplification...

Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood...

as kids we counted on our fingers, as we grew up we started counting more on people, now what do you think was more disappointing?

Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the future.We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half...

Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposedlimitations.

E’ una bambina che è stata punita per la sua innocente superbia, una bambina che ha commesso l’errore di pensare di essere grande quando era piccola, di contare quando non valeva niente, di essere circondata...

There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter — loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which...

These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the micro landscapes of their own grazed knees; put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing and they could...

Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.

The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.But no...

It’s hard to say. Sometimes people have had terrible childhoods. And sometimes they just haven’t found their special place in life. And sometimes they’re dogs from hell and must be destroyed.

We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the...

Shush – it’s silent time again.

This framing accents the importance of building a tidier system, one that incorporates the array of existing child care centers, then pushes to make their classrooms more uniform, with a socialization agenda “aligned” with the...

Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except “Do you have enough room in the toes?

My interest in the potency of fear comes from my Taiwanese childhood in which fear of ghosts was used to shape my values.

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

During my childhood, I was surrounded by actors, and all I remember is they were fun to be around. That kind of sticks.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack in ‘Titanic’ was my childhood crush!

The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those...

At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch...

I had a very normal childhood, and my mother cooked very normal food.

Children act on the words they hear.May your words be gracious to the hearing of children.May your words inspire and challenge children to fulfill their true potential.

In the end, that’s what Kevin has never forgiven us. He may not resent that we tried to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lurking behind it. But he does powerfully resent...

their suburbia house in Brentwood” was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children...

. . .from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And...

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...

I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

When you are a grown up your brothers become your neighbors and your unconditional brotherhood become your conditional neighborhood.

I like the smell of my Grandma’s soap – I used to sit in the bath and eat it.

Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.