#Childhood

"Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them."

"School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible."

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

"My childhood was very difficult. I had every childhood disease and then some, but my parents didn't mollycoddle me. They left me to fight those battles on my own. I guess that was very Canadian, very stoic. But it's good. I had to become a warrior. I had to give up hope and find a substitute for hope that would be far more stable."

"We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It's something that makes you feel - 'I can do this stuff.'"

"and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful."

"Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul."

"To have a childhood surrounded by people like Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh sounds glitzy, but for years I wanted to repress it. I couldn't take that kind of power and success."

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

"Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things."

"When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."

"Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul."

"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose."

"That's what makes it so right. Your eyes—your soul is there, but the rest of you is still so undefined. That's the beauty of childhood. The eyes show everything you've seen so far, but the rest of you is still so open to possibility, to whatever you might become."

"The Lord has been there from wanting to be a momma, to having a wonderful childhood life and dreaming of having a good motherhood as a child; always wanting to meet a good old country boy and having someone to love as much as I love my husband Roland and having a little boy that is a mixture of the both of us."

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

"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."

"There is much that I do not know and I'd like to know even less."

"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 cold-blooded."

"No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a leg blown off, and for days, even weeks after it happened, they could still feel the arm itching, the leg itching, the mother calling."