#childhood

. . .from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. ↗

— Maurice Sendak

#childhood #fantasy #childhood

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

Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents... ↗

— J.M. Barrie

#pets

The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer. ↗

— Paulo Freire

#comprehension #creativity #education #understanding #youth

...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

I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them ↗

— Maurice Sendak

#fantasy #fear #imagination #life #imagination

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood. ↗

— George Eliot

#imagination

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