#hood

Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? Agatha would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss. ↗

— Sarah Addison Allen

#women #childhood

I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself. ↗

— Julie Gregory

#memoir #childhood

Would it be possible for me to see something from up there?" asked Milo politely. "You could," said Alec, "but only if you try very hard to look at things as an adult does." Milo tried as hard as he could, and, as he did, his feet floated slowly off the ground until he was standing in the air next to Alex Bings. He looked around very quickly and, an instant later, crashed back down to the earth again. "Interesting, wasn't it?" asked Alex. "Yes, it was," agreed Milo, rubbing his head and dusting himself off, "but I think I'll continue to see things as a child. It's not so far to fall. ↗

— Norton Juster

#childhood #perspective #childhood

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#childhood #motherhood #projection #psychology #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

When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#life

I tried to show him things, but he didn't seem to study what I showed him. Usually, he just put whatever I handed him in his mouth. He would try to eat anything. I fed him Tabasco sauce and he yelled. Having a little brother helped me learn to relate to other people. Being a little brother, Snort learned to watch what he put in his mouth. ↗

— John Elder Robison

#brothers #childhood #children #siblings #life

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures. ↗

— Christian Smith

#human-nature #humanism #identity #personalism #personhood

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#motherhood #parenting #parenting

Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#regret #kids