…nobody was ever really ready to turn off their mother’s machine, no matter what they thought; to turn off the light of their childhood and walk away, just as if they were turning out a...

That’s because we have it so good”, I told her, trying on his deep voice. We impersonated him all the way home, laughing and blowing bubbles, both of us knowing that he was right. We...

For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of ‘old people’ and sense that one day...

He didn’t want to play football. He wanted to be told the truth.

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and . . . Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do...

It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.

I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world – a childish feeling, I grant, but we can’t help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All...

The truth of the matter was something much more subtle and tremendous than any plain physical miracle could ever be. But never mind that. The important thing was that, when I did see the stars...

Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she...

As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and...

You know, it’s pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still...

This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes.

Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.

So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week...

The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when...

Louis was often struck by Gage’s speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter but fairly amiable way. He...

I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they’d just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn’t translate through sports, or music, dancing,...

I had a serious childhood illness – sort of like spinal meningitis – that led to a three-month hospitalization. Afterward, I couldn’t be insured because of a pre-existing condition.

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is...

The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.

The foundations of your childhood, they stay with you.

They say adolescent ‘best’ friendships are like love affairs where we learn the rules of relationships: commitment, trust, loyalty, jealousy, exchange, loss. Not being acquainted with the theories of friendship, Charles and Lise chose each...

I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren’t called turtlenecks, I wouldn’t have worn them.

THE LILIESThis morning it was, on the pavement, When that smell hit me again And set the houses reeling. People passed like rain: (The way rain moves and advances over the hills) And it was...

People give 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 were the Middle Ages, you’d be married and...

Looking back into childhood is like turning a telescope the wrong way around. Everything appears in miniature, but with a clarity it probably does not deserve; moreover it has become concentrated and stylized, taking shape...

The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.

We’ll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.

The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed.

Your childhood,” said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn’t chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even...

Yeah, I guess that’s fair, … And in a weird way my childhood was a great precursor to where I am now. Every year I had to learn how to interact in a new schoolyard,...

It is time for a return to childhood, to simplicity, to running and climbing and laughing in the sunshine, to experiencing happiness instead of being trained for a lifetime of pursuing happiness. It is time...

In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child’s need for quietness is the same today as it...

Su estado de ánimo ante la Mica era un caso especial, diferente del estado de ánimo de sus amigos. Y si no, ,por qué Roque, el Moñigo, o Germán, el Tiñoso, no adelgazaban tres kilos...

Childhood reading is so important.

life is protected most under parents shelter.after this-examinations are ours.willing to give or not.life never asks for options.

Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won’t they, Rose? You want to ask,’Whose child is this?'”Rose chuckled.”But usually, they’re just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.

It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.

Whatever I learned,Whatever I knew,Seems like those faded years of childhood that flew,Away in some dilemma,Always in some confusion,The purpose of this life,Seems like an illusion!

(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech...

… I wrote about … my childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.

Childhood is either absurdly superficial or profoundly shitty. There’s no in-between. Anyone who reminisces about their happy childhood is delusional.

In the midst of the vagaries of life, they provide us a trip to the land of goodness and fairies, of imaginations and possibilities.A childhood that wasn’t spent watching cartoons or reading comic strips, no...

Didn’t you ever have a father yourself? You don’t want him for a reason. You want him because he’s your father.’ So I figured it’s because I never had a father that I don’t want...

Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from...

I was just four when a hired teenage field hand attempted to molest me. Miraculously, I got away, and I told my dad. My father made three important choices that day: He listened to me,...

From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed service at the age of twenty-seven, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than...

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and...