#childhood

Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever… ↗

— Roddy Doyle

#coming-of-age #growing-up #paddy-clarke #roddy-doyle #age

This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes. ↗

— Nina LaCour

#innocence #memories #art

You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn’t. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you, I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods. Lucy was well-meaning enough. But if she’d have her way, your happiness at Hailsham would have been shattered. Look at you both now! I’m so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn’t be who you are today if we’d not protected you. You wouldn’t have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn’t have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you? So she had to go. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#emily #hailsham #kathy #lucy #miss

Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories! ↗

— A.B. Guthrie

#childhood-memory #childhood-stories #dickens #interview-transcription #kipling

Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood. ↗

— Rudolfo Anaya

#beauty #bless #childhood #llano #me

I try to clutch onto those last moments in the place that I was born to, but I was so busy *living* them! How was I to know I'd have to capture everything I ever wanted to remember of Eire for the rest of my life? ↗

— Kate McCafferty

#ireland #memory #business

They say a happy childhood is a lousy preparation for life. Kids who spend their playground days fat, ginger or gay know the truth. The world has always been full of vicious predators. For plenty of people this carnage and savagery is business as usual. ↗

— Adam Baker

#gay #life #zombies #business

Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except "Do you have enough room in the toes? ↗

— Florence King

#children #family #business

You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives. ↗

— Glenn Beck

#determination #enlightenment #father #grief #mother

Childhood was the past. It couldn't be changed, only remembered. ↗

— Aleatha Romig

#change