childhood

For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.

If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost in the mountain, doesn't it? And dies in the night, in the cold.

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.

The very matrix of our ability to love and bond in later life, maternal sensitivity _ or lack thereof _ also determines cultural tenor.

Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

Childhood is not all candy stores and recess; it__ frustrations and confusions, too.

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.

... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.

Have you ever loved someone so intensely, so entirely ,that it's painful to be apart from them? I'm not talking about being in a long-distance relationship or even a particularly painful case of unrequited love. I'm talking about being in a completely different world from the other person, a world where you can see them and hear them but you can't touch them and they can't see or hear you.

So to all who are situated as I am, I would say--Grow up as fast as you can.

You were very serious,_ her grandmother continued. __ou had these big brown eyes and you were always going, __hat__ that? What__ 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.

The play will begin at six sharp. Parents and family, I hope you'll stay for the PTA meeting that will follow." A few parents coughed in response. George knew that coughing was the adult equivalent of groaning.

What a great and happy place the world was! But you had to be big and grown-up before you could do just what you liked.

We take it for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum.You move as a rower moves: facing backwards. You can see where you've been, but not where you__e going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir.You'd see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real.You__ know which friendships will last, which days are important, and prepare for upcoming mistakes. You'd go to school, and learn to forget.One by one you'd patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before youmeet and go your separate ways. And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger.You'd become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness.You'd fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything. Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again. You wouldn't have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out.You'd know from the start which week was the happiest you__l ever be, so you could relive it again and again.You'd remember what home feels like,and decide to move there for good. You'd grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving.You'd try everything one last time, until it all felt new again. And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you__ think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people.You'd start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last.Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood.You'd become generous, and give everything back.Pretty soon you__ run out of things to give, things to say, things to see.By then you'll have found someone perfect; and she'll become your world.And you will have left this world just as you found it. Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.

In these few seconds Finn lived such a long time, that the marble fell back into the bottom of an exhausted world.

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.

I prepared to get out of bed, tossing the covers aside, the sheets dank-smelling, gray from my body. I wondered how long it had been since I'd changed them. And then I wondered how often you were supposed to change them. These were the kinds of things you didn't learn. I changed bedclothes after sex, now, finally, and that I only learned a few years ago from a movie on TV: Glenn Close, some thriller, and she'd just had sex and is changing the sheets and I can't remember the rest, because all I was thinking was: Oh, I guess people change sheets after they have sex. It made sense, but I'd never thought of it. I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.