#child

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#child #childhood #encouragement #memoir #memories

Later on Lady Maccon was to describe that particular day as the worst of her life. She had neither the soul nor the romanticism to consider childbirth magical or emotionally transporting. So far as she could gather it mostly involved pain indignity and mess. There was nothing engaging or appealing about the process. And as she told her husband firmly she intended never to go through it again. ↗

— Gail Carriger

#life

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. ↗

— Richard Bach

#fascination #life #life

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#life

من المستحيل أن تحمي أطفالك من الإحباط أو خيبة الأمل التي سيصادفونها في حياتهم ↗

— Nicholas Sparks

#foil #life-lessons #novels #life

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays—when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren? ↗

— George Orwell

#legacy #plants #posterity #walnut #life

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines. ↗

— Hilary Mantel

#consciousness #ghosts #life #past #life

Progress should never be impeded by a need to coddle adults who respond to the world as children. ↗

— Kelli Jae Baeli

#children #maturity #philosophy-of-life #progress #life

I would not want to be a child again, for a child exists in uncertainty and danger. Our flesh and blood, we cannot help but fear for them, as we hope for them to make their way in this life. ↗

— Keith Donohue

#life

And the game of dominoes is much like life: You gotta play the bones you’ve pulled. It don’t matter if you got seven doubles in your damn hand. ↗

— S.B. Redd

#divorce #fiction #marrige #paternity #paternity-fraud