childhood

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

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?

A child isn__ born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let__ just say that when I realized that I didn__ want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can__ go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map.

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.

Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .

Phoebe realized how very wrong she__ been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she__ 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__ pretend to be anything else. Here, things seemed so normal, so perfect, but it was all a deception.

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child__ ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother__.

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.

The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun islike a yellow hole. . .

I can remember staring at the orphanage and feeling envy.

I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.And so I dream of going back to be.

His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.

...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

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-__omething 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___erhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on.