As a Jew, I had no desire to challenge my childhood prejudice. But as a teacher, I could not do otherwise.
Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.
But when physical appearance evades the scrutiny of our senses and enters the sanctuary of our hearts, then it can forget itself. I know, from my childhood's experience, how devotion is beauty itself, in its inner aspect.
We must experience certain things in life, even in our childhood, so we can later look back and value the journey.
Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.
A child with minimal video and TV exposure... might be more naive about social ills but at the same time more sophisticated in inner direction, self-discipline, and the realities of her actual physical world.
Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
When loneliness is a constant state of being, it harkens back to a childhood wherein neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life.
Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.
Hence, in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?
It’s my belief that animals can help a human being travel to the wounds of childhood. The best part is, once you go there, you can fix things. Get on with life.
You could always call her secretive, masking her feelings beautifully lest anyone intrude into her inmost realm of hidden thoughts. It was a defense Urmila had evolved since childhood.
Belief is like that, a circle, and often I find that the seemingly simplistic explanations from childhood for the unexplainable have merit, maybe more so than all the educated and contrived answers of adulthood.
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.
I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.
Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.
...I do have to wonder what sort of childhood the Grimm brothers endured. They are not a merry bunch of storytellers, what with their children roasted by witches, maidens poisoned by old crones, and whatnot.
Increasingly, the girl child is becoming an endangered specie as pedophiles’ continue to roam free in our societies terrorizing the lives of our children and stripping them of all the joy and excitement that comes with childhood.
In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts." (p. 12)
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
