Childhood Story Quotes & Sayings

Obviously because of my personal connection to Mandela and having had his story as part of my childhood, I knew how awesome he was. — Lenora Crichlow

Everyone tells you to write what you know. It's the tried-and-true advice every writer hears at some point in her career. But to take my writing to a deeper level, I've found that a better practice is to simply write what frightens you, haunts you, even. I now keep a sign on the bulletin board in my office that reads: 'Write What Scares You.' I've learned that tapping into the hard stuff - whether it's the fear of loss or a boogeyman lurking in childhood memories - is what ultimately gives a story the power to leap off the page and grab you by the collar. — Sarah Jio

Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music ... Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby ... After mother's rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going. — Ang Swee Chai

I went to church my entire childhood, and do you know what I learned?" "What?" "Not a thing. I know I heard a lot of things about God, but I don't remember one of them." "Maybe you didn't have good teachers." "How good do you have to be to teach a child one thing? No, the problem wasn't that they couldn't teach me one thing. The problem was they tried to teach me everything. Every week was a different story and a different lesson with a different picture. All I knew is that if I sat there quietly, I'd get a cookie at the end. — Andy Stanley

I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life. — Moshe Kasher

Catholicism fascinated him, the contortions it put itself through to make ends meet. Father Murray had kept returning to the word 'despair.' There'd been a little (bizarre, Luke thought) linguistic diversion into Latin. Desperare, formed by the 'de' prefex, signifying the removal of or from, and 'sperare,' meaning to hope. The removal of hope. That was despair. The reasoning being that you couldn't live without hope. What Murray hadn't said (but what, along with the story of the suicide ghost, Luke remembered from childhood) was that despair was classified as a sin against the Holy Spirit. That was the perverse beauty of the religion: that your daughter could be raped and murdered and yourself still condemned for giving up hope. — Glen Duncan

Alana Marks had always known she was different. From her gypsy childhood, to the way she now made her living in the movies, she'd always lived on the edge. She'd been paid to leap from a sixteenth story window, roll a car to a cliff edge, get thrown off a speeding train and dragged into a river by a runaway horse. At the moment, she was about to set herself on fire and jump out of a burning barn. — Barbara Kyle

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else
an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood
or it may be easier to blame the map you were given
folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print
but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.
One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way. — Nick Flynn

Most of my story ideas come from my childhood. Sometimes they hatch from stories my parents told me, sometimes they come from experiences in my own life, and sometimes they are inspired by mere moments. — Kimberly Willis Holt

A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances. — Elizabeth McCracken

What NYU tried to teach had no relation whatsoever with the reality of what making a film is like. You cannot teach someone aesthetics. What you can do is say, "If you were in this situation and this is the kind of story you wanted to tell, here are a couple of ways you could try to make things work." But they didn't really do that. I did my three years there, and I have said at times that besides my childhood, going to NYU was the single most destructive experience of my life. It took me eight years to recover.
~Tom Dicillo — Nicholas Jarecki

Part of the job of adults was to set limits. But the last rule, the unspoken rule of any story or journey, is that all limits are suspect. All warnings show only the point where the last story stopped, the boundary past which the map is unmapped. The Kingdom of Here There Be Dragons is the province of explorers, magicians, and kids. — Bob Proehl

To become a fad, a psychiatric diagnosis requires 3 preconditions: a pressing need, an engaging story, and influential prophets. The pressing need arises from the fact that disturbed and disturbing kids are very often encountered in clinical, school, and correctional settings. They suffered and cause suffering to those around them - making themselves noticeable to families, doctors, and teachers. Everyone feels enormous pressure to do something. Previous diagnoses (especially conduct or oppositional disorder) provided little hope and no call to action. In contrast, a diagnosis or childhood Bipolar Disorder creates a justification for medication and for expanded school services. The medications have broad and nonspecific effects that are often helpful in reducing anger, even if the diagnosis is inaccurate. — Allen Frances

No, the point of this story is that there are only a select few friends, past or present, that I would go to such lengths to stand by. That's what school really taught me: the enduring nature of friendship. How special it is to grow up and share a history with someone. As I've gotten older, friendships rooted in childhood feel even richer and more irreplaceable. — Connor Franta

It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story. — Tim Winton

Some people who've read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that's the way it should be, because in real life two people can look at the same president and one will see a hero and the other a villain. — Jeannette Walls

Throughout our times with Christopher [therapist] we were encouraged to work together at communicating on the inside. He pointed out that it would be good for us all to listen-in when an alter was telling his/her story - that it's now safe, no harm will come to us from telling or from knowing. There was once a time when it was very important that we didn't know what had happened; that knowing meant danger or being so overwhelmed with pain and grief that we wouldn't survive. But now it was different. We're safe and strong, and our goal now are to uncover the grisly truth of what's happened to us, so that it's no longer a powerful secret. We can look at it and face the past for what it is - old memories of old events. Today is now,and we can choose to live a different way and believe different things. We were once powerless and vulnerable, but now we were in a position to make choices. We had control over our life. — Carolyn Bramhall

Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some - such as Josie, Jim, and Ben - to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers, - barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I'm remarrying you, Lil. Fuck, I'd remarry you a hundred times until it stuck. — Krista Ritchie

Pamalican Island is a wonderful story told with the sparkle of fun and a true understanding of the magic of childhood. A magical journey for any child who dreams of desert islands. — Raffaella Barker

When you are falling short in vocabulary to explain the emotion in your story.Than you are writing the right story — Tushar Upreti

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town - Lee's was in the South, mine the Northwest - but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that. — Chris Crutcher

My sexual exploits with my neighborhood playmates continued. I lived a busy homosexual childhood, somehow managing to avoid venereal disease through all my toddler years. By first grade I was sexually active with many friends. In fact, a small group of us regularly met in the grammar school lavatory to perform fellatio on one another. A typical week's schedule would be Aaron and Michael on Monday during lunch; Michael and Johnny on Tuesday after school; Fred and Timmy at noon Wednesday; Aaron and Timmy after school on Thursday. None of us ever got caught, but we never worried about it anyway. We all understood that what we were doing was not to be discussed freely with adults but we viewed it as a fun sort of confidential activity. None of us had any guilty feelings about it; we figured everyone did it. Why shouldn't they? — Aaron Fricke

I love you," he says again, "and no other man will ever say those words and mean them the way I do. — Krista Ritchie

Whatever I learned,
Whatever I knew,
Seems like those faded years of childhood that flew,
Away in some dilemma,
Always in some confusion,
The purpose of this life,
Seems like an illusion! — Mehek Bassi

...One cannot help but consider the future- what will it be like when all the wild places of the earth have been taken over by civilization, and there is no more room for Indians, Pirates, and Wild Boys? — Christopher Daniel Mechling

My childhood was bad. No father. Mother was greedy and brought me up awful - never made me breakfast once. I don't want to get started. One story is worse than another. — Rodney Dangerfield

Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood. — Freya Stark

What makes this story so remarkable is that throughout my early childhood I had ongoing learning difficulties, particularly in mathematics. I struggled to learn the multiplication table, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't remember 6 times 7 or 7 times 8. — Andrew Lo

Losing Abby wasn't a story I remembered from early childhood
it was in my face, debilitating me like a sickness, robbing me of my senses and physically, excruciatingly painful. My mother's words echoed in my ear. Abby was the girl I had to fight for, and I went down fighting. None of it was ever going to be enough. — Jamie McGuire

Oh, yes, Alice did know that she forgot things, but not how badly, or how often. When her mind started to dazzle and to puzzle, frantically trying to lay hold of something stable, then she always at once allowed herself
as she did now
to slide back into her childhood, where she dwelt pleasurably on some scene or other that she had smoothed and polished and painted over and over again with fresh colour until it was like walking into a story that began, 'Once upon a time there was a little girl called Alice, with her mother, Dorothy. One morning Alice was in the kitchen with Dorothy, who was making her favourite pudding, apple with cinnamon and brown sugar and sour cream, and little Alice said, 'Mummy, I am a good girl, aren't I? — Doris Lessing

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction. — Paul Auster

Bright were the memories of his childhood at these docks, to which he had been ever drawn by the allure of the stranger traders as they swung into their berths like weary and weathered heroes returned from some elemental war. In those days it was uncommon to see the galleys of the Freemen Privateers ease into the bay, sleek and riding low with booty. They hailed from such mysterious ports as Filman Orras, Fort By a Half, Dead Man's Story, and exile; names that rang of adventure in the ears of a lad who had never seen his home city from outside its walls.
The man slowed as he reached the foot of the stone pier. The years between him and that lad marched through his mind, a possession of martial images growing ever grimmer. If he searched out the many crossroads he had come to in the past, he saw their skies storm-warped, the lands ragged and wind-torn. The forces of age and experience worked on them now, and whatever choices he had made then seemed fated and almost desperate. — Steven Erikson

Few persons can relate the story of their childhood without idealizing, or distorting, or overdramatizing the facts. — Katharine Anthony

I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read . The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy , and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. — James A. Baldwin

In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood - red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin - which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side.

It's a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing 'The End.' Even if you didn't like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it's over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling. — Jo Ann Beard

After a childhood reading fairy tales and myths, is it any wonder that when I began to write my own stories I included fairy tales? Fairy tales are storytelling at its most basic. They've been with mankind for as long as people have told stories to each other. Fairy tales speak to something intrinsic in humans - they touch our most primitive selves. How else to explain that the Cinderella story is told in nearly every society on earth? To think of fairy tales as merely stories for children is to ignore thousands of years when fairy tales were used to teach morality, to warn, and to entertain both children and adults. — Elizabeth Hoyt

Books by Roald Dahl The BFG Boy: Tales of Childhood Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator Danny the Champion of the World Dirty Beasts The Enormous Crocodile Esio Trot Fantastic Mr. Fox George's Marvelous Medicine The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me Going Solo James and the Giant Peach The Magic Finger Matilda The Minpins The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes Skin and Other Stories The Twits The Umbrella Man and Other Stories The Vicar of Nibbleswicke The Witches The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More — Roald Dahl

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life
birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it. — Michael Shermer

Nobody wants to see the truth. Everybody wants to have the fantasy. When I look back at the books I was reading in my childhood were selling some sort of fantasy as well. Most stories are not going to tell the deep suffering of every day. No book prepared me for the suffering I would experience in life because the word "suffering" does not even describe what the suffering is. No story is going to tell you that, and no words can tell you that. — Signe Baumane

To Alef, the letter
that begins the alphabets
of both Arabic and Hebrew-
two Semitic languages,
sisters for centuries.
May we find the language
that takes us
to the only home there is -
one another's hearts.
...
Alef knows
That a thread
Of a story
Stitches together
A wound. — Ibtisam Barakat

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines. — Hilary Mantel

My childhood is a part of my story, and it's why I'm who I am today and why my career is what it is. — Misty Copeland

That's all childhood is, after all: strong arms to hold back the dark, a story to keep the shadows dancing, and a candle to mark the long journey into day. — Seanan McGuire

To me the early childhood story is an ecumenical one. You take poverty seriously. You take seriously maternal depression. You take seriously children under stress and you take seriously the effects of extended hours participation in poor quality care. Those are the facts I begin with. — Robert Manne

When you hear the words 'magic' and 'story', they will probably evoke thoughts of your favourite fairy tales from childhood. Storybook pages abound with all manner of magic: fantastical fairies, wish-granting genies, or even a certain boy wizard. — Tony DiTerlizzi

I should mention here that librarians tell me never to tell this story, and especially never to paint myself as a feral child who was raised in libraries by patient librarians; the tell me they are worried that people will misinterpret my story and use it as an excuse to use their libraries as free day care for their children. — Neil Gaiman

What's going to happen," he breathes, "is that I'm going to carry you through this door. I'm going to draw out every single moment until you're exhausted. And I'm going to move so slow that three months ago will feel like yesterday. And tomorrow will feel like today, and no one in this fucking universe will be able to say your name without saying mine. — Krista Ritchie

The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you're in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you're in your zone. — Gilbert Hernandez

Through the years the swirl of a pen, click of a key, and the idea of a story have been my deepest passion. I never just decided to become a writer. I was born to be a writer. I knew it from childhood. — Sai Marie Johnson

Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren't lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth - because the story of Grandpa Portman's childhood wasn't a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story. — Ransom Riggs

Bruce Wayne's childhood experience of losing his parents during a random back-alley mugging remains the primary origin story for the Batman character, but other than irrationally (or, more accurately: insanely) motivating his desire to fight crime, the trauma seems to have had little discernable effect on his character. — Dan Hassler-Forest

My childhood home was a large, light-blue, two-story house with a big front yard to play in. — Connor Franta

'Bless Me, Ultima' is quite autobiographical in the sense that I was writing a story about my childhood, my hometown where I grew up, Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on Old Highway 66 and the Pecos River. So a great deal of that environment, landscape, people, got thrown in the novel. — Rudolfo Anaya

A providence is shaping our ends; a plan is developing in our lives; a supremely wise and loving Being is making all things work together for good. In the sequel of our life's story, we shall see that there was a meaning and necessity in all the previous incidents, except those that were the result of our own folly and sin, and that even these have been made to contribute to the final result. Trust Him, child of God: He is leading you by a right way to the celestial city of habitation; and as from the terrace of eternity you review the path by which you came from the morning-land of childhood, you will confess that He has done all things well. — F.B. Meyer

True adulthood would mean no longer denying the truth. It would mean feeling the repressed suffering, consciously acknowledging the story remembered by the body at an emotional level, and integrating that story instead of repressing it. Whether contact with the parents can then in fact be maintained will depend on the given circumstances in each individual case. What is absolutely imperative is the termination of the harmful attachment to the internalized parents of childhood, an attachment that, though we call it love, certainly does not deserve the name. It is made up of different ingredients, such as gratitude, compassion, expectations, denial, illusions, obedience, fear, and the anticipation of punishment. Time — Alice Miller

If you could get anything at all off Santa, what would it be?'
I asked for a fire engine and sweets. Bunty exclaimed in delight, 'Santa will get you that, but you and Scott will need to leave out a bowl of milk and some carrots for Rudolph.'
'Who's Rudolph?' I asked.
Bunty told me in confidence that Rudolph was Santa's reindeer and that he helped pull all the children's toys in the world over the snow. I couldn't wait.
In readiness for Rudolph, Scott, Martha, Bunty and I picked out four of the biggest carrots from a bag in the kitchen, which we then washed. We found a big bowl that we used to lick the cream out of, which we filled with milk. We put the bowl along with the carrots under the Christmas tree, with all the other children's offerings. Then Bunty and Martha came in and washed us, put us to bed and read us a story, before kissing us good night. On their way out they said, 'When you wake up, Santa will have been'. — Stephen Richards

Wait for me." The words come out choked and pained. "I need you to wait for me. — Krista Ritchie

When you saw the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," that was Michael [Jackson]'s story write large. Born as an elderly person, Benjamin Button was, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and in the film starring Brad Pitt, he dies as a newborn child. Michael Jackson's childhood was one of enormous, prodigious production.He was a child prodigy, he was a wunderkind. — Michael Eric Dyson

I'm an old man, now. I've been alone since my 17th birthday. I'd wanted to marry, have a bunch of kids, and maybe be a grandpa. The big family around the Thanksgiving table, laughing and pouring wine and cracking jokes and harmlessly teasing the missus - I wanted that. I wanted to do something good with my life - something right. I didn't want what happened to Danny, my best childhood friend, to be the only mark I'd ever make in this world. But I thought it best not to fancy such hopes and dreams: a family, love. I'd been cursed by my best friend, and I thought it right not to inflict that curse on anyone who'd be foolish enough to love me. — J. Tonzelli

I wanted to deconstruct the puppet show. I wanted to turn it inside out and do stuff that you're not supposed to do. I didn't want it to be gentle like most puppet shows tend to be, since they come from childhood where you're gently trying to tell a story. I wanted to blast all that out of the water. I think there's plenty of room of any kind of attitude toward puppets. I call puppeteering acting while hiding. — Wayne White

I was increasingly both horrified and sceptical about these memories - I had no recall of these things at all, though I couldn't imagine why I'd want to make it all up either. It felt as though it had all happened to somebody else, I was not there - it wasn't me - when those people did nasty things.
But then, of course, it didn't feel like me, that's the whole point of dissociation - to create distance between the victim and her experience of the abuse. The alters were created for just that purpose: so that I'd not be aware that it happened to me, but rather to "others". The trouble is, in reality it was my body that took the abuse. It was only my mind that was divided, and sooner or later the amnesic barriers were bound to come down.
And that's exactly what had begun to happen as I heard their stories. They triggered a vague and growing sense in me that this really is my story. — Carolyn Bramhall

The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. — Ian McEwan

Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one more time. They were people ... The stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart's desire ... but only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. — Diane Setterfield

I wanted the Andy of Toy Story 3 to be right on the cusp, straddling childhood and adulthood ... I wanted to find this sweet spot where he had gotten tall and had clearly grown up but still retained many boyish qualities, including a boyish charm. — Lee Unkrich

Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end. — Joe Hill

Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul. — Ivan Doig

It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. — C.S. Lewis

At the expense of Gregor's sacrifice, the sister, at the end of the story, stretches her arrogant body and gets the liberation Gregor longed for. Under Gregor's care first, and then her parents', the sister enjoys a healthy childhood, one leading to physical and mental development, and one in which she isn't trapped. Yet our loyalty to Gregor extends even beyond death, and his sister's cheery success story offers but a bitter pill — Franz Kafka

Adoption isn't just a childhood experience, it's a life-long experience. — DaShanne Stokes

I'll always be yours.No distance or time apart will change that,Lily. — Krista Ritchie

I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know. — Ann Druyan

History is a ghost story. My own childhood has passed into history, and the ghosts I find there are the ghosts of Heroes and dragons and Berserks and witches, and it has become fashionable not to believe in these things anymore. But I believe, for I was there. — Cressida Cowell

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears. — Rick Perlstein

Most of the things that I remember from childhood wouldn't make a particularly good story: rescuing worms during rainstorms, our schnauzer attacking a wheel of cheese when someone dropped it during dinner, my parents tricking us into riding Space Mountain at Disney World (we thought it was an educational people-mover kind of ride), playing Star Wars (I got to marry Harrison Ford and my sister married Luke Skywalker) in first and second grade. On the other hand, we always had lots of interesting babysitters
seminary students and friends of my parents
who told really good ghost stories. — Kelly Link

So, although my story is sometimes ugly, it's also beautiful. — Niki Krauss

Memory retains some things and discards others. I remember every detail of some scenes from my childhood and adolescence, by no means the most important ones. I remember some people and have totally forgotten others. Memory is like the headlights of a car at night, which fall now on a tree, now on a hut, now on a man. People (usually writers) who tell the story of their lives as a continuous and detailed whole generally fill in the gaps with conjecture; it is hard to tell where genuine reminiscence ends and the novel begins. — Ilya Ehrenburg

The Story Girl was written in 1910 and published in 1911. It was the last book I wrote in my old home by the gable window where I had spent so many happy hours of creation. It is my own favourite among my books, the one that gave me the greatest pleasure to write, the one whose characters and landscape seem to me most real. All the children in the book are purely imaginary. The old "King Orchard" was a compound of our old orchard in Cavendish and the orchard at Park Corner. "Peg Bowen" was suggested by a half-witted, gypsy-like personage who roamed at large for many years over the Island and was the terror of my childhood. — L.M. Montgomery

Love may not be enough to wake a child in the morning, dress him, and get him to school, then to feed him at night, bathe him, and put him to bed. Still, can any of us imagine a childhood without it? — Andrew Bridge

She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell.
Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it.
And it's delicious. — Orson Scott Card

Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart-messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world ... As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story ... It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you'll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along. — Martha Beck

I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams. — Halldor Laxness

Writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word
a glance . The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. — Ian McEwan

What drew me to Batman in the first place was Bruce Wayne's story, and that he's a real character whose story begins in childhood. He's not a fully formed character like James Bond, so what we're doing is following the journey of this guy from a child who goes through this horrible experience of becoming this extraordinary character. That, for me, became a three-part story. And obviously the third part becomes the ending of the guy's story. — Christopher Nolan

In life, we all have a cross to bear and a unique story to tell. We just hope that someone will take the time to listen. — Greg McVicker

She knew how to hit to a hair's breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty ... At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed, they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other. — Thomas Hardy

Children come into the world with that sense of celebration and delight in the awesomeness of life. Then we eat of that wonderful, terrible fruit depicted in the story of the Garden of Eden, and our lives become divided. In childhood we have innocent wholeness, which then is transformed into informed separateness. If one is lucky, a second transformation occurs later in life, a transformation into informed wholeness. A proverb puts it this way: in life our task is to go from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection and then to conscious perfection. — Robert A. Johnson

I want to be an example of a guy who made something of himself out of nothing. A guy who overcame the odds of a tough childhood, who worked hard, who didn't let his surroundings get the best of him and lead him to jail or the graveyard. Where I ended up - being a comedian, a TV star, and a movie actor - might be unique, but my story is not. — Tracy Morgan

During his public life, Barack Obama has often referred to his biracial background and itinerant childhood and has said, 'In no other country on Earth is my story even possible.' True. — Monica Crowley

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn't mean we aren't telling the truth; we've simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don't go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It's the story we shape and improve on, we don't change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear. — Ann Patchett

Most of the books I remember from my childhood were Dr. Seuss-type books. They were fun to read, but there wasn't a real story behind them. — Tony Dungy

My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime. — Jay-Z

For mysterious reasons, many authors consider it useful to provide a story about a forty-year-old man-about-town with a prologue drawn from his life as a five-year-old boy ... There's only one letter's difference between "yarn" and "yawn," and it is often a long letter, filled with childhood memories. — Howard Mittelmark

No one told me you can love someone and still be miserable. How is that possible? — Krista Ritchie

As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story. — Sally Mann

If you feel how I felt, I have been taught a few techniques that might help you. Here's one for a kick-off: You have to forgive everyone for everything. You can't cling on to any blame that you may be using to make sense of the story of your life. Even me with my story of one nan that I love and another that I don't - that story is being used to maintain a certain perspective of mine, a perspective that justifies the way I am, and by justifying the way I am I ensure that I stay the same. I'm no longer interested in staying the same; I'm interested in Revolution, that means I have to go back and change the story of my childhood. — Russell Brand

the truth remains that whether someone loves you or not has no bearing on how loveable you really are. Your childhood is not the last chapter in your story. Your first love is not your only love. Your greatest heartache is not the whole story of your life. Your parents are not God. An unhappy past, no matter how terrible, is not a reason to say "I am not loveable," nor is it a reason to stop loving yourself. Actually, it is a reason to love yourself more. You can only be held back by your past if you use it to reject yourself in the present. Your life is a love story. It is the story of how much you — Robert Holden

Hillary Clinton said that her childhood dream was to be an Olympic athlete. But she was not athletic enough. She said she wanted to be an astronaut, but at the time they didn't take women. She said she wanted to go into medicine, but hospitals made her woozy. Should she be telling people this story? I mean she's basically saying she wants to be president because she can't do anything else. — Jay Leno

Every February, (Charles)Shultz drew a strip about Charlie Brown's failure to get any valentines. Schroeder, in one installment, chides Violet for trying to fob off a discarded valentine on Charlie Brown several days after Valentine's Day, and Charlie Brown shoves Schroeder aside with the words "Don't interfere
I'll take it!" But the story Schulz told about his own childhood experience with valentines was very different. When he was in first grade, he said, his mother helped him make a valentine for each of his classmates, so that nobody would be offended by not getting one, but he felt too shy to put them in the box at the front of the classroom, and so he took them all home again to his mother. — Jonathan Franzen