#childhood

Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them. ↗

— Simon Van Booy

#childhood #children #mystery #wisdom #love

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment. ↗

— Bauvard

#cynicism #disillusionment #funny #growing-up #humor

...If I ever got sloppy and maudlin, it would be for the streets of my childhood—but no self- respecting writer should ever eulogize a slum... ↗

— John Geddes

#eulogy #maudlin #muse #slum #streets

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home ↗

— Sue Monk Kidd

#home #nostalgia #childhood

...Oh hours of childhood, when behind each shape more than the past appeared and what streamed out before us was not the future. We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake of those with nothing left but their grownupness. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#childhood #fourth-elegy #change

But the memories that hang heaviest are the easiest to recall. They hold in their creases the ability to change one's life, organically, forever. Even when you shake them out, they've left permanent wrinkles in the fabric of your soul. ↗

— Julie Gregory

#pain #painful-childhood #painful-memories #change

That made her pause, almost made her want to laugh. She pushed her hair from her face. "God, we're fucked up, aren't we?" His tight features loosened a little. "Yeah, I've been trying to get over it most of my life. I guess I'd had myself talked into thinking I had." "Me, too. I'm sorry," she told him, her shoulders relaxing. "I didn't need to get so pissed off." He cracked a grin, "You did, though, didn't you? I kind of liked seeing you like that. All that fire. ↗

— Eve Berlin

#childhood-memories #love

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about. ↗

— Michael Ende

#childhood #children-s #children-s-books #good-sense #literature

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma. ↗

— Judith Lewis Herman

#childhood-suffering #childhood-trauma #freedom

Childhood is a short season. ↗

— Helen Hayes

#season #short