#childhood

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age. ↗

— John Gardner

#introspection #age

Childhood is this time of magic and monsters; hoping for one and fearing the other... The worst part of being a kid is discovering which one exists... So, I chose to believe in magic. ↗

— Thomm Quackenbush

#fear #hope #magic #monsters #dreams

tis true, 'tis pity, and 'tis pity, 'tis true.' what delightful things we might do were it not for Mrs. Harmon Andrews! ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#anne-shirley #childhood-favorites #dreams

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal. ↗

— Ryū Murakami

#childhood #education #growing-up #high-school #life

In silence the three of them looked at the sunset and thought about God. ↗

— Maud Hart Lovelace

#faith #god #sunset #thought #faith

I could hear you, talking to the daffodils and tulips, whispering to the fairies that lived inside their petals. Each separate flower had a different family inside it. ↗

— Lucy Christopher

#family

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once she grows up. ↗

— Pablo Picasso

#childhood #creativity #freedom

On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down. ↗

— Alan Hollinghurst

#children #funny

I was increasingly both horrified and sceptical about these memories - I had no recall of these things at all, though I couldn't imagine why I'd want to make it all up either. It felt as though it had all happened to somebody else, I was not there - it wasn't me - when those people did nasty things. But then, of course, it didn't feel like me, that's the whole point of dissociation - to create distance between the victim and her experience of the abuse. The alters were created for just that purpose: so that I'd not be aware that it happened to me, but rather to "others". The trouble is, in reality it was my body that took the abuse. It was only my mind that was divided, and sooner or later the amnesic barriers were bound to come down. And that's exactly what had begun to happen as I heard their stories. They triggered a vague and growing sense in me that this really is my story. ↗

— Carolyn Bramhall

#amnesia #amnesiac #childhood-abuse #dissociation #dissociative-identity-disorder

Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. ↗

— Betty Smith

#imagination #imagination