childhood

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.

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

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!

My whole life, you have made decisions for me.""Your whole life," Georgiana pointed out, "totals nine years.

He gave each wolf its own name, and he told me that they were crossing the Moon River, a place that he said, __s where all wolves go when they die.

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__ 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.

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.

Because the victims are __nly 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__ 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__ tender, budding self?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's one best thing about childhood our genuine smile...

Believe in Eternity, believe in childhood, believe that the beauty of innocence lives on and on and on. I know it does.