#childhood

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#old-age #age

It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#nicole-krauss #the-history-of-love #love

Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-a-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#childhood #relentlessness #love

Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips. ↗

— Gary Shteyngart

#dad #diary #father #love #personality

We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected. ↗

— Ben Okri

#dreams

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#growth #growth

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood. ↗

— Jane Yolen

#disease #literature #magic

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#childhood #literature #reading #stories #words

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be. ↗

— John Connolly

#childhood #child

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you ↗

— Gail Carson Levine

#bridge #childhood #childhood