No child should ever be too sad to play.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find...

If we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger.

On some days she was able to see both sun and moon at the same time. Like feuding cousins, they hung in two corners of the vast world-ceiling refusing to look at one another. The...

Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.

Don’t you find it odd,” she continued, “that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water–it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom...

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.

…but even Peter Pan had to grow up one day.

Look at me!” he would shout as he ran laughing through the halls of Storm’s End. “Look at me, I’m a dragon,” or “Look at me, I’m a wizard,” or “Look at me, look at...

It’s hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.

Ô maudite enfance, qui ne veut pas mourir !

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose...

Yet I had become very attached to George Roc. I liked him, not for the joy of playing with him, not for some talent that made him stand out from the rest, not even for...

Every summer, like the roses, childhood returns.

Vivien thought how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn’t know the first thing about being brave.

Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep but it’s not so badI don’t worry and I don’t weep. In fact I’m glad.Because I get up off my pillow and I flip on the light.I get down...

This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of...

I want to be in fifth grade again. Now, that is a deep dark secret, almost as big as the other one. Fifth grade was easy — old enough to play outside without Mom, too...

What better reminder do we have than our kids of our own best selves, our less stressed and more carefree selves? In their silliness we see the echo of the way we used to be:...

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our...

If your child is constantly interrupting or doing other things to get your attention, he is not getting enough communication of the right kind. Just the fact that you are in the house with him...

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother...

Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids’ version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones.

When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything,...

The songs from your childhood, when you hear them you get chills all over.

The books we read in childhood don’t exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as...

Carelessness was once something to be owned. They wore it around their necks as they joined the springtime breeze while ducking in and out of the forest believing their fairy tale.

That’s the trouble with memories: everything seems much more fantastical with a childhood lens to filter out the limitations of reality.

The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them

Often, under the layers of our maturity is a child’s insecurity screaming for love and attention.

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin

As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

I had heard my brothers and sisters use curse words but had never dared use one myself in front of anyone. But I had practiced alone in my room lots of times, trying out different...

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I reasoned as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them...

Enfim, por alguma razão se fazem as guerras, respondeu o avô, levantando as sobrancelhas. Só nas guerras é que os homens podem matar-se uns aos outros sem serem castigados.

In a way I haven’t quite stopped mourning the end of my childhood.

In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm...

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.

A child s a special possession from God.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you’re no longer their child.

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you’re so wrecked it’s hard to believe you ever were a child?

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you’re ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can....

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves — our own hungers,...

For the first time I realized I could be more than a crawling little pile of bones and flesh in a onesie.

Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted...

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way–and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.