childhood

Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood.

You__e a good boy. I wish you didn__ have to be quite so good

Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.

Sometimes It's awesome to be childish with your friend or partner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To this day, being able to __ake 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__ 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__ death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn__ really depend on people__hat, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn__ indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.

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.

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.

Fairy-tales exist and the best proof for this is our own childhood! Yes, childhood is a real fairy tale!

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.

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.

Summertime is a period for youthful explorations, a joyful time when we learn lessons without grand expectations or harsh consequences.

You'd be surprised how many childhoods each of us has.

I suppose the only time we ever really get to be happy in life__ike one hundred percent blissful__s when we__e little kids.""Because there__ less to worry about?""Because we__e too stupid to know how worried we should be.

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.