#childhood

I still had a normal childhood with my friends from school. ↗

— Demi Lovato

#friends #had #i #normal #normal childhood

My nomadic childhood dramatically fed my eventual decision to be an actor, but not in the way you might think. ↗

— Josh Lucas

#childhood #decision #dramatically #eventual #fed

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room ↗

— Audrey Niffenegger

#happiness #loss #love #memory #mother

the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy. ↗

— Harold Brodkey

#innocence #love

From New Year's Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew quiet, as if all the people had disappeared. ↗

— Shogo Oketani

#culture #japan #tokyo #japan

...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

Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off when you stop growing, because childhood is all gone. And they grow back when you shrivel up, because love is all gone. Leaves spring up at will, writes Lola, just like tall grass. Two or three children in the village don't have any leaves, and those have a big childhood. A child like that is an only child, because it has a father and a mother who have been to school. The leaf-fleas turn older children into younger ones - a four-year-old into a three-year-old, a three-year-old into a one-year-old. Even a six-months-old, writes Lola, and even a newborn. And the more little brothers and sisters the leaf-fleas make, the smaller the childhood becomes. ↗

— Herta Müller

#love

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#inspirational #rites-of-passage #inspirational

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