Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?
I am no longer haunted by my dead father. I am no longer haunted by childhood home. There's so many things I've cured myself of without realising and now when I'm embark on a project I know I'm going to cure myself of it.
I have two kids now and through watching them, I keep having flashbacks to my own childhood.
Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.
I remember seeing Stand by Me, when I was around 12, and just feeling like, "This is so refreshing to see kids swear and smoke cigarettes like my friends. " It just felt much more real than the Sesame Street version of childhood that I'd been spoon-fed.
Childhood is the purest state. The pure of heart never leave it behind. Their life merely takes them on a cirtuitous route away from, and then back to it.
Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, believe not because you have been made to believe from you childhood, but reason truth out, and after you have analyzed it, then if you find it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it and help others live up to it.
The obsession with food filled my childhood - that's what happens when your parents are from a place or time where people really might starve. In America, my Jordanian father spent decades cooking professionally and pursuing his dream of a restaurant, and it was one of the central ways that he explained himself to his American children. Even though he's a passionate talker, he has a hell of a time with listening. His cooking gave him a way of having a conversation - which was a really interesting thing for a writer to look at.
I think the action movies in the 80s and 90s were different. It was a testosterone age. Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone - they fuelled my childhood. But now I don't think I'd like to do just action, I don't enjoy that.
Someone said: "I have been prejudiced against myself from my earliest childhood: hence I find some truth in all blame and some stupidity in all praise. I generally estimate praise too poorly and blame too highly.
I gave up my childhood for a career.
So many people are killing their childhood. It's like, "Okay, today I've decided I'm gonna be a grown-up, and I'm not a kid anymore. " But, that's bullshit. You're still a kid. It makes no sense to kill the kid.
Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone--childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.
My happiest childhood memories are of times in our backyard. My mother had an old clothesline that hung out in front. It seemed like it stretched a mile long, and I loved sitting in the sun while she hung clothes.
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.
One of the most important lessons of childhood is discovering what you like to do.
If you are religious at all, it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false (knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan), you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.
Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it.
When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.