c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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 and get hip in the still of the night I stretch and I yawn and then I breathe real deep And dance myself to sleep.I hoof around my beddie just a-tappin' my toes Before I know what's happened I'm a-ready to doze Got some partners I can count the boogie-woogie sheepI dance myself to sleep.
— Jim Henson, It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider
what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we wanted wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. Life would be one long party.Yes, that had been the dream.
— John Marsden, The Dead of Night
They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days. She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish-–something they heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They had all their little treasures. . . And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and he believed it to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries––perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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.
— Camilla Way, The Dead of Summer
I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.
— Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House
Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.
— Stephen King, The Waste Lands
Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.
— John Gardner, Grendel
Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That 'Builds Character.
— Deb Caletti, The Story of Us
To express nostalgia for a childhood we no longer share is to deny the actual significance and humanity of children.
— Perry Nodelman
When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.
— Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
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.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was out in the open. Their lives were dirty and squalid, but they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Here, things seemed so normal, so perfect, but it was all a deception.
— Jennifer McMahon, Don't Breathe a Word
Despite being what would now be called a deprived child in a one parent family, I did not grow up with an urge to smash windows or to bash old ladies over the head in order to steal handbags.
— Eva Hart
The little room was full of ordinary things that had already become precious, that I couldn't help but want to have again, to feel like whoever it was I used to be, whether it was my past or someone else's.
— Wendy McClure, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
There is something about Christmas that requires a rug rat. Little kids make Christmas fun. I wonder if could rent one for the holidays. When I was tiny we would by a real tree and stay up late drinking hot chocolate and finding just the right place for the special decorations. It seems like my parents gave up the magic when I figured out the Santa lie. Maybe I shouldn't have told them I knew where the presents really came from. It broke their hearts.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze.
— Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.
— Mark Twain
My next memory is of waking up, it then being dark outside, and my brother and sister fast asleep on the couch. Sitting up I sensed something was broken. Maybe the night? It was open and alive with lights and noises and worried voices. The adults were up, and in and out: we were all waiting for something.
— Shane Levene
Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.
— Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener
Childhood is the barrel they give you/to go over the falls in.
— Linda McCarriston, Eva-Mary
Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.
— Gary Shteyngart
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 unfed and mothers and fathers were dim and far away--too far away to ever reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal--would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard.
— Harold Brodkey
You'd be surprised how many childhoods each of us has.
— David Rivard, Wise Poison
For the first time I realized I could be more than a crawling little pile of bones and flesh in a onesie.
— Sarah Lofgren, All the Ways Moosh Failed Me
If somewhere deep within me arises some essenceof having been a child, one I never experienced,perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,I don’t want to know it. Without even looking,I want to form an angel out of itand hurl him into the foremost rankof screaming angels, to remind God.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
For many of us, the curtain has just come down on childhood.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
…but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she was older, there was no difference between them.
— Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1
Children remember who showed them kindness when the world tried to make them cruel.
— K. Arsenault Rivera, The Tiger’s Daughter
I had a very happy childhood, but I wasn't that happy a child. I liked being alone and creating characters and voices. I think that's when your creativity is developed, when you're young. I liked the world of the imagination because it was an easy place to go to.
— David Walliams
I wonder if anyone gets through childhood without being broken. I certainly did not.
— Kiersten White, Now I Rise
But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.
— John Darnielle, Universal Harvester
Fairy-tales exist and the best proof for this is our own childhood! Yes, childhood is a real fairy tale!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
He considered himself, and the way he moved in reaction, like a pinball, from one thing to the next, as he was told, as was expected, as made the least friction, and he knew this was the lazy behavior of a scared boy.
— Laleh Khadivi, A Good Country
Did it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
My sisters and I stand on the deck, the shale tile cool against the soles of our feet - for a week it seems we never have to wear shoes - and take turns twirling, the matching turquoise silk skirts my mother bought us sliding coolly up our legs, our laughter flying out over the ocean. We are all light and happy and far, far away from home.
— Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
Because the victims are “only children,” their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years’ time these children will be adult who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children. They may consciously fight with vigor against cruelty in the world yet carry within themselves an experience of cruelty that they may unconsciously inflict on others. As long as it remains hidden behind their idealized picture of a happy childhood, they will have not awareness of it and will therefore be unable to avoid passing it on.It is absolutely urgent that people become aware of the degree to which this disrespect of children is persistently transmitted from one generation to the next, perpetuating destructive behavior. Someone who slaps or hits another adult or knowingly insults her is aware of hurting her. Even if he doesn’t know why he is doing this, he has some sense of what he is doing. But how often were our parents, and we ourselves toward our own children, unconscious of how painfully, deeply, and abidingly they and we injured a child’s tender, budding self?
— Alice MIller, The Drama of the gifted child
While Ginger didn't like the evil-recipe days, she certainly loved the treat-making days. She liked rolling dough and cutting it into perfect shapes. She liked grating chocolate into curlicues and pouring syrups into lollipop molds.
— Suzanne Selfors, Kiss and Spell
In childhood, we learn to remember everything and later, meditate to forget everything!!!!
— Harrish Sairaman
The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe.
— Stephen King, The Mist
It doesn't matter how many years go by, how grown-up we think we are, how much we presume we have changed or evolved, when we are back in our childhood homes, we become exactly who we have always been.
— Jane Green, The Sunshine Sisters
She understood him with the knowing and not-knowing that comes of being a child. When you focus on your parent as if they are the center of the earth, that thing on which your survival depends, only later do you realize their flaws, their scars, and their weaknesses.
— Scott Cawthon
The sword was called Kaledvoulc'h, which means hard lightning, though Igraine prefers to call it Excaliber, and I shall call it so as well because Arthur never cared what name his longsword carried. Nor, did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. “What is the egg to the eagle?” he asked me, then said that he had been born, he had lived, and he had become a soldier, and that was all I needed to know.
— Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King
you’ll find the buildings taller, thatthe halls are full of ghostsbut everything still here iswhat you remember most
— Savannah Brown
He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am
It's funny reading about how I behaved in the days before memories formed. So thanks for that input, Mom and Dad - wasn't so bad after all.
— Connor Franta, A Work in Progress
The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
They didn't really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grown-ups. And they never learned to be just kids, either. Stuck in never-never land. Kinda sad.
— Gerry Boyle, Borderline
Play with your dolls for not more than half an hour, no more than fifteen minutes, no more than a second, a millisecond. If you learned math as fast as you ran outside to play, then you might be a genius. But you do not and you are not. You're a hole where knowledge goes to sleep.
— Weike Wang
I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you're part of a big social scene, it's an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow,wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.
— Frankie Boyle, My Shit Life So Far
Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, 'It's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.' That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear. She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well-wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, 'She's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.'This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the 'dead' part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Why is it that places thousands of miles from my childhood village home send me back, opening the sluice-gates of the past? Well, we are all emigrants from the homeland of our childhoods. It may be, then, that the natural place to meet ourselves as children is 'abroad', and that includes the foreign country of our growing up and aging. So it is that the personal, physical feeling of departure from the time of childhood may merge in a special symbiosis with geographical departure, biography and geography resonating now on a single wavelength.
— Georgi Gospodinov, The Story Smuggler
My whole life, you have made decisions for me.""Your whole life," Georgiana pointed out, "totals nine years.
— Sarah MacLean, Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover
She might be the best-dressed little girl in her elementary school class, but she was still a Greek. Her parents spoke a foreign language, their food was different, and she looked different from the children she went to school with in Corktown.
— Suzanne Jenkins
How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing.
— Joyce Rachelle
This tiny, white-washed Infants' room was a brief but cosy anarchy. In that short time allowed us we played and wept, broke things, fell asleep, cheeked the teacher, discovered things we could do to each other, and exhaled our last guiltless days.My desk companions were those two blonde girls, already puppyishly pretty, whose names and bodies were to distract and haunt me for the next fifteen years of my life. Poppy and Jo were limper chums; they sat holding hands all day; and there was a female self-possession about their pink sticky faces that made me shout angrily at them.Vera was another I studied and liked; she was lonely, fuzzy and short. I felt a curious compassion for stumpy Vera; and it was through her, and no beauty, that I got into trouble and received the first public shock of my life. How it happened was simple, and I was innocent, so it seemed. She came up to me in the playground one morning and held her face close to mine. I had a stick in my hand, so I hit her on the head with it. Her hair was springy, so I hit her again and watched her mouth open up with a yell. To my surprise a commotion broke out around me, cries of scandal from the older girls, exclamations of horror and heavy censure mixed with Vera's sobbing wails. I was intrigued, not alarmed, that by wielding a beech stick I was able to cause such a stir. So I hit her again, without spite or passion, then walked off to try something else.
— Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie
Old age is the new childhood.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Nothing
The more a child is abused, the more the child uses his abilities to anticipate, manage, prevent, dismantle, and challenge the abusing ways of his parents.
— Steven Franssen, Make Self-Knowledge Great Again
Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom.It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June.We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder.She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.
— Emily Ruskovich, Idaho
Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me.
— Samuel Beckett, First Love and Other Novellas
Utopia exists only in one's childhood life.
— Hayao Miyazaki
The most childish thing is to believe that you are an adult now...
— Himanshu Bisht
I often think with regret of that fresh, beautiful feeling of boundless, disinterested love which came to an end without having ever found self-expression or return. It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood's days, for those days to come back to me!
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood
Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended.
— Floyd C. Forsberg, The Toughest Prison of All
I should mention here that librarians tell me never to tell this story, and especially never to paint myself as a feral child who was raised in libraries by patient librarians; the tell me they are worried that people will misinterpret my story and use it as an excuse to use their libraries as free day care for their children.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Summers end to soon just as childhood ends before we apprehend the effervescent of our youth.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Summertime is a period for youthful explorations, a joyful time when we learn lessons without grand expectations or harsh consequences.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
[Life] has been passing since the day he was born, and everything he puts off, chooses not to do or say because he is hoarding experience for his real, adult life isn't a thing safeguarded but a treasure risked. The world is full of things put off for the wrong reasons, which can suddenly become impossible without warning. They hang in the air like ghosts, their mouths and eyes sewn up forever. They will never be able to speak, but if it was you who put them there, you will always be forced to see them.
— Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain
Where his boyhood retreat had been a cave hewn for one, it now accommodated two. He was suddenly two and it amazed and delighted, causing a stir in the pit of him, a kind of fibrillation.
— Emma Richler, Be My Wolff
What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues-innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection-are our sole objects of pursuit?
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood
Not having yet passed through those bitter experiences which enforce upon older years circumspection and coldness, I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of trying to resemble grown-up people.
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood
People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me either way!
— Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody
Adoption isn't just a childhood experience, it's a life-long experience.
— DaShanne Stokes
Believe in Eternity, believe in childhood, believe that the beauty of innocence lives on and on and on. I know it does.
— Yann W. Tanoe, Childhood is Eternal
I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Dear child,you're not just anyone.One day,you're gonna have to make a choice.You have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be.Whoever that man is,good or bad,is gonna change the world
— Pavel Visan Alexandru
I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut—this indescribable emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do. Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. Knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner.
— Hugh Howey, Beacon 23
When I was a child, I used to look at the sky and wonder how were stars fixed on the canopy and why didn't they fall on Earth. I also wondered why they disappeared in day time. When I grew up, all my questions got answered, but I lost my innocence.
— Tarif Naaz
We're celebrating our freedom. We're celebrating our ability to be kids when everything is trying to take that away from us. It's a choice, Ty. We can do whatever we want.
— Matthew Quick, Sorta Like a Rock Star
It's said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn to mark out your own space. It's double shaming - shaming to REMEMBER as well, to fee so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people's purgatory.
— Lorna Sage, Bad Blood
People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me wither way!
— Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody
Do you ever plan to grow up, Veltan?” he asked.“Not if I can avoid it, no.
— David Eddings, Crystal Gorge
That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
If you want to breed something, breed bravehearts, not soulless racehorses.
— Abhijit Naskar
I liked all the children in my class. Back then, I think we all just tacitly assumed that we were equal. That we were all in the same boat. We didn’t really think about our different genders, races or classes. We just co-existed, like one big family.
— Joss Sheldon, The Little Voice
I stumbled out into the street, hoping that I looked like a drunken sailor. Everything was all topsy-turvy because my eyes were filled with tears. I clutched my shoes to my chest as I went. I cried loudly, not even bothering to wipe the tears and snot off my face. I just let it all pour down, allowing everybody walking by to see what this world had done to me. If a kid my age walks down the street in her socks, crying her eyes out, then it makes it a bad neighborhood. I was glad I was making their world a shitty place to live.
— Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
As we grow older, we forget how near to the ground we once were. I do not mean merely because our heads were lower down than they are now, though of course that comes into it; but near in the sense of kinship. A small child is aware of the sights and smells and textures of the ground with an acute awareness that we lose in growing up.
— Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
strangers seem uncomfortable when you question them about their childhood. But really, what else are you going to talk about in line at the liquor store? Childhood trauma seems like the natural choice, since it’s the reason why most of us are in line there to begin with.
— Jenny  Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir
She would never, ever understand the idea that a child, especially an infant, was of more value than an adult who had already gained all the skills needed to benefit the community. The death of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around.
— Becky Chambers
Jean and I had, as I think a great many best friends have, a secret make-believe world of our own. We had only to say, 'Let's be Lilian and Diana,' and, as though it was a magical formula, step straight into a world that was as real to us as the world of school and parents and cornflakes for breakfast. . . . In the summer after my father retired, Jean came to stay with me in North Devon. On the first morning, we retired to the rustic summerhouse. 'Let's be Lilian and Diana . . .'But the magic formula no longer worked. We tried and tried; but we could only _act_ Lilian and Diana; we could not _be_ them any more. I suppose the break had been too long, and we were just too old. We went on trying for days, searching for the way in. But it was like searching for the lost door to a lost country. Finally, without anything actually being said between us, we gave up and turned to other things. But with Lilian and Diana, something of Jean and Rosemary had gone too: left behind the lost door to the lost country. It was one of the saddest experiences of my young life.
— Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
A person who could withstand such dreadful insults from his or her enemies can have the ability to reach his or her potentials by becoming socially, educationally and economically successful.
— Saaif Alam
So what was Jonah like before high school? As a kid?”“As a kid?” Hallelujah brings up the picture in her mind. “He was . . . sweet, I guess. Dorky. He’d wear these outfits his mom picked out—pleated khaki pants and polo shirts, with his hair slicked down with gel. And he would get really enthusiastic about things. Too enthusiastic. He went through this cowboy phase where he wore a cowboy hat and boots to school every day. Didn’t care what anyone thought.” The mental image makes her smile.“And he and Luke were best friends?”“Starting in middle school, yeah. They played soccer together.”“Huh.” Rachel pauses. “So when did Jonah get cute?”“He was still pretty short in middle school. And skinny. But he did start dressing better.”“No more pleated khakis?”“No more pleated khakis. And then the summer before ninth grade, he had this growth spurt. And he started to, uh, fill out. So I guess ninth grade is when I noticed . . .” Hallelujah fades off. “This is embarrassing.”“No, it’s not. This is what girls talk about.” Rachel grins. “Besides. I wanted to see if you were paying as close attention to him as he was to you.”“I didn’t realize I was. We were just friends.”“You can be friends and still objectively notice someone’s cuteness.
— Kathryn Holmes
Now, ten or more years later, far away from her home or even any thought of having a home, she again touched the feeling from that long ago day, being alone but not lonely, of being solitary yet sufficient.
— Tad Williams, Shadowheart
To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren’t supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw’s death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.
— J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
You’re a good boy. I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good
— Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls
I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.
— Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton
He gave each wolf its own name, and he told me that they were crossing the Moon River, a place that he said, “Is where all wolves go when they die.
— Amber D. Tran, Moon River
Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that their were either forgotten or misremembered.
— Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours
Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.
— Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.
— John le Carré, Absolute Friends
Because of you my golden childhood is lost in the corridors of wastes.
— Tanmaya Guru
At the age of my play this country gave me a stone on my head.
— Tanmaya Guru
Today, childhood is trying to find his future in the trash.
— Tanmaya Guru
God is also born again and again on this earth to enjoy the childhood.
— Tanmaya Guru
Childhood is trying to find his future and frustrating has become his destiny.
— Tanmaya Guru
Think of the Christmas presentof gashes you opened when, in an attempt to be Superman, you slid in stocking feet on a slippery wood floor and crashed half way through a window. Hopes of heroism dashed on the heels of no clear sighting of Santa.
— Kristen Henderson, Of My Maiden Smoking
Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.
— Hilary Mantel
One of the things that Eva hated the most about being a kid was how everyone always told her that childhood was the best time of their entire lives, and don't grow up too fast, and enjoy these carefree days while you can. In those moments, her body felt like the world's smallest prison, and she escaped in her mind to her chile plants, resting on rock wool substrate under a grow light in a bedroom closet, as much a prisoner of USDA hardiness zone 5b as she was.
— J. Ryan Stradal, Kitchens of the Great Midwest
Envy is a much natural byproduct when your childhood isn’t the way it is supposed to be
— Faraaz Kazi, More Than Just Friends
But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I only wanted to tell you that this was the wonderful time for you. Don’t let any of it go by without enjoying it. There won’t be any more merry-go-rounds. No more cotton candy. No more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you, Martin, that this is the wonderful time. Now! Here! That’s all. That’s all I wanted to tell you.
— Rod Serling, Stories from the Twilight Zone
Either I can go back to my childhood or my childhood can come forth to me. This is what I'm desperately wishes...
— Hira Shahid Kazim
I knew that the tears of adults were wetter, saltier, and much, much sadder than those of a child
— Thomas Burnett Swann, Day of the Minotaur
It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
Making up for lost time?" "Yes," I say. "A lot of things were stolen from my childhood. Lots of important things. And now I have to get them back." "In order to keep on li
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
The earlier years - the ones I've just been telling you about - they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can't help feeling a sort of glow.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Childhood is an exploratory period of calculated investigation. The nagging feeling that a child’s life has not really began until he or she attains adulthood makes growing up both a whimsical and fretful time. Childhood is not all merriment since a child realizes that seamless youthful days are an experiment for adulthood.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Making up for lost time?""Yes," I say. "A lot of things were stolen from my childhood. Lots of important things. And now I have to get them back." "In order to keep on living."I
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Sometimes It's awesome to be childish with your friend or partner.
— Dinakar Reddy, Redefining MahaBharata: with a philosophical touch
This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.
— Cormac McCarthy
But Claire had long ago realized, even after those constant dreams of her mother leaving faded away, that when you are abandoned as a child, you are never able to forget that people are capable of leaving, even if they never do.
— Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost
She came towards me with a juicy gash between her legs that smelled like my best friend's sister" Just when I thought I'd escaped them allShe comes reeling herself inpulling at my stringsher hand quick to find my zipperShe moaned the way a drunk old lady doesAnd I wasn't even inside her yet"You don't have anywhere else to be," she managed to say..."My wounds have been reopened tonight already," I mutteredI caught wind of the gully ...the part of her she once kept sacred as a ChristianI smelled the informationI lifted my hand into the air and hailed a cabHe rolled down his window and saw her"Find another cab," he said, and sped off into the nightI took her homebecause she said she was lonelyreally she was drunk off somethingsome memory or some choiceshe walked funny... -one of her heels had brokenOn the couch I left her,Before I could go, she grabbed my cockI slapped her across the face and she pulled harderHer eyes stayed closedHer lips dripped Her grip clenched I wasn't getting out of this one unscathed"If I take my pants off, will you let me go?" I asked"If you take your pants off, I'll be suckin' that cock till you pass out from all the screamin'..."I slapped her again, because she needed itShe laughedSaying her cousin beat her harderSaying her father knew how to really... ...make things happenI asked her what her father's number wasLet's get his motherfucking self up here to take you away, that's what I saidShe said he died, or killed himself"What's the difference really," she said, chewing on her hairShe let go of my cock on her own accordAnd she opened her eyes for a momentShe closed them againAnd I could tell she was sleepingHer eyes opened once moreHer face red where I'd hit herShe tasted the blood on her lip"Do you think if we remind ourselves enough, we can make up for all the pain we've caused others?"I said to her, "We can't. All we can do is keep ourselves from all those who don't deserve it.
— Dave Matthes, Strange Rainfall on the Rooftops of People Watchers: Poems and Stories
Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?
— Nicholson Baker
Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night.
— Elena Ferrante
Once upon a time there was a girl named Debbie Jacobs and a boy named Teddy Dennis.
— Rick Remender, Tokyo Ghost, Vol. 1: Atomic Garden
That is the problem with being twelve. All the grown-ups think they have a right to know your business.
— Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic
I suppose the only time we ever really get to be happy in life—like one hundred percent blissful—is when we’re little kids.""Because there’s less to worry about?""Because we’re too stupid to know how worried we should be.
— Brian K. Vaughan
Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations.
— Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
You throw a sponge into a sink full of dirty water and it'll soak up several times its weight and hold onto it. Throw something less porous, like a stone, into a sink full of dirty water, and it'll still get wet. Pull it out and it feels about the same, weighs about the same, but there's a slight change in texture, a film over it, and droplets of water are still settled into the minuscule pits and crevices of the stone. Even as a child, I recognized hypocrisy and prejudice at play, but I was also at my most impressionable and, inevitably, whether I liked it or not, I retained bits of it.
— Brianna Karp, The Girl's Guide to Homelessness: A Memoir
I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me ‘diffident’) and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder... I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached others, all my fear forgotten.
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten
[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten
I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?
— Patti Smith, M Train
...ya can't get to Nevada on five bucks and a bad heart...
— Dave Matthes, Return to the Madlands
From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Glory
Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded himJoyfully
— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten
There's one best thing about childhood our genuine smile...
— shivangi lavaniya
When I was a kid I worried that when I woke up, I'd find my family having breakfast with my doppelgänger. We would fight to the death, and then my family would peacefully finish breakfast.
— Fran Krause, Deep Dark Fears
I could sum up my younger life in one word.-Misunderstanding. Most of my school life was spend in protection mode. Which made any 'benefit' I could get from socializing, useless.
— TinaJ. Richardson
As child, when the elders spoke their wise words, it only echoes in my ears. As an adult, I have crystal clear insight to the wise aphorisms by the elderly.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten
To all the boys, for when you become men: you'll leave women all throughout your life because they're holding you back, and even after she's gone she'll still weigh you down. To all the women: stay away from us men. We don't know anything about you, despite what we try to convince you of.
— Dave Matthes, Paradise City
You know one day, you're going to look back on these days. And everyone you went to high school with will either be getting married to each other, shitting out kids, or dropping dead like flies," when she spoke, Miss Jenson sighed at the end of every few words; she must have been narrating her own thoughts she might have otherwise kept to herself, "and everything you never did, you'll never be able to even try.
— Dave Matthes, Paradise City
...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.
— Dave Matthes, Return to the Madlands
It would be a very long time before we saw any of our original pursuers again. At least, it seemed kinda long. But nothing warps time quite like childhood. I remember visits to faraway worlds that lasted only a few days but felt like entire lifetimes. And then there were the endless journeys between destinations that somehow went by in the blink of an eye. You know how it goes.
— Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Vol. 3
That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal.
— Sigmund Freud
Wasteland is land which is worthlessfor cultivation. Like a child who has been emotionallybruised in a way that can never heal.
— Pankaj Suneja, The Mobile Phone
I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." ... I wonderes if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
My world was very limited in size and experience. Small things took on extra importance, at least to a child.
— Dan Groat, An Enigmatic Escape: A Trilogy
You were very serious,” her grandmother continued. “You had these big brown eyes and you were always going, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ You wondered what everything was. You would frown and point a lot, like a conductor looking for your orchestra. You always seemed very busy, like you were between appointments all the time, but you were just a little child.
— Carrie Fisher
I mostly felt fortunate, to have lived here, in this house, in this town, with this family and these parents, and tried to think of all the things that had influenced me along the way.
— Jason Gay, Little Victories: Perfect Rules for Imperfect Living