Quotes & Sayings About Forgotten Childhood

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot. — Stephen Fry

Some people's glasses are half full. I'm the one drinking them.
Some people have forgotten that Pluto is still a planet. I still remember my childhood.
Some people are vegans. I have common sense.
Some people call me Maurice. Some people call me the Gangsta of Love.
Some people just want to live ... but me, I'm the one still alive. — Dave Matthes

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good. — Neil Gaiman

The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992. But there was another, irruptive, sense of things past. The sudden reencounter in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa. — Teju Cole

Sifting through long forgotten stories of my childhood and writing on a daily basis, I became obsessed with following the threads of my memories, one leading to another. I start pulling on a single, seemingly trivial strand, only to discover it is attached to a longer strand; that one in turn is attached to an even bigger one. Sometimes, I find have tugged a whole, hidden tapestry of my past into view, one thread at a time. — Alice Bag

When I was a kid, Toronto streets were deserted and quiet on Sundays, except for the sound of church bells I stood on the sidewalk one December listening to the Christmas bells - I've never forgotten that moment ... — John Geddes

Alas ! How few of Nature's faces are left alone to gladden us with their beauty ! The cares, and sorrows, and the hungerings, of the world, change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass off, and leave Heaven's surface clear. It is a common thing for the countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to subside into the long-forgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and settle into the very look of early life; so calm, so peaceful, do they grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel even upon earth. — Charles Dickens

He who has forgotten his childhood and lost sympathy with the children is not a man who can teach them or help them. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia - that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives - and fail to find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. — Sigmund Freud

She had come out of her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up children she could only pretend gently to love, guided orphans. The people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her--she sought in them the vitality that had made them independent or creative or rugged, sought in vain--for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole's exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams? — Shin Kyung-sook

I live 50 miles from London and we've got some of the highest levels of teenage and childhood poverty in the country. It's disgusting. Just because it's a rural area, it gets forgotten. — Roger Daltrey

I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me 'diffident') and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder... I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached others, all my fear forgotten. — Oliver Sacks

Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it. The ink with which we write seems diluted with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible memory. It is as if our inward selves, released from the bonds of daytime and objectivity, revelled in prisoned emotions which are hastily stifled when we translate them. In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations of man, for on them rests no yoke of line or hue. Forgotten scenes, and lands more obscure than the golden world of childhood, spring into the sleeping mind to reign until awakening puts them to rout. — H.P. Lovecraft

I painted the lines and colours that affected my inner eye. I painted from memory without adding anything, without the details that I no longer saw in front of me. This is the reason for the simplicity of the painting, their obvious emptiness. I painted the impressions of my childhood, the dull colours of a forgotten day. — Ulrich Bischoff

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was. — Ian McEwan

Watching Joel sip his iced tea and listen to stories of my childhood, the ones my mom told at all of the family gatherings, I felt my heart warm. He'd been there too. And as she spoke in scattered memory he was probably filling in the small details that had been lost and forgotten in time by everyone else. — Shawn Kirsten Maravel

Your mortal suitor has already forgotten this journey. But you and I, we share memories of a childhood that I will never forget. You are the lady of my heart. My match in every way. I would've stayed at your side once we banished Queen Red, never left you to rule alone. We could've danced every night in the stars above your kingdom. For you, I would've given up my solitary life ... been your loyal footman and cherished you eternally. — A.G. Howard

One hundred twenty-nine women with documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked about abuse history. Seventeen years following the initial report of the abuse, 80 of the women recalled the victimization. One in 10 women (16% of those who recalled the abuse) reported that at some time in the past they had forgotten about the abuse. Those with a prior period of forgetting--the women with "recovered memories"--were younger at the time of abuse and were less likely to have received support from their mothers than the women who reported that they had always remembered their victimization. The women who had recovered memories and those who had always remembered had the same number of discrepancies when their accounts of the abuse were compared to the reports from the early 1970s.

Recovered memories of abuse in women with documented child sexual victimization histories.
Journal of Traumatic Stress. 1995 Oct;8(4):649-73. — Linda M. Williams

Those who rhapsodize about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it's like to be 12 years old. — Joyce Maynard

Suddenly it seemed that all that had been learnt in every English childhood of the wildness of English magic might still be true, and even now on some long-forgotten paths, behind the sky, on the other side of the rain, John Uskglass might be riding still, with his company of men and fairies. Most — Susanna Clarke

On the ground rules of life are changed, you no longer have the ability to understand what you might have forgotten from a previous incarnation. No adult really knows what was lost in the process of growing up, because the adult brain cannot quite realize the mentality in which childhood memories are fully meaningful. With that level of change comes a kind of partial death. — Jaron Lanier

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 woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify by their own lonesome familiarities to this feeling. Ecstasy, even , I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. — Jack Kerouac

Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it. — Gavin Maxwell

A birth we embark on a good journey, seeking a destination of happiness. The journeys on our life-road facilitate development of our emotional, mental, physical and spiritual states-of-being, into a way of true power and wisdom. The Heart-center power, expressed as happiness and love, will guide us upward on a path away from frustration, bitter toil and travail. These journeys are directed inward, not outwardly in material mementos of ego and possession. The lesson is relearning that which has been suppressed and forgotten, in ourselves, since our earliest childhood. — R. Carlos Nakai

The place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

My father was too distracted to see anything in this. Mimicking my mother, he taped it to the fridge in the same place Buckley's long-forgotten drawing of the Inbetween had been. But my brother knew something was wrong with his story. Knew it by how his teacher reacted, doing a double take like they did in his comic books. He took the story down and brought it to my old room while Grandma Lynn was downstairs. He folded it into a tiny square and put it inside the now-empty insides of my four poster bed.

~pgs 217-218; Buckley's childhood — Alice Sebold

When I made my way across childhood to the tinny AM radio, it was dark. Lights out. I listened intently. More intently than I ever had before. Something was speaking to my unformed-ness like a long lost friend. Something that I had never met but forgotten nonetheless. I was 'realizing' that music was 'different' from other things in life. — Jane Siberry

No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile - not even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who had said it. — Paulo Freire

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. — Carl Sagan

When I saw myself thus wholly cut off from human succour, incapable of attempting anything for my deliverance, I thought of heavenly succour. Memories of my childhood, of my mother ... came back to me. I began to pray, little as I deserved that God should know me when I had forgotten Him so long; and I prayed fervently. — Jules Verne

Only In Sleep
Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.
Only in sleep Time is forgotten
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.
The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child? — Sara Teasdale

My mother showed her gratitude for her life in exile by alluding to India's modernity: the expansive railway network; the Bollywood movies she came to love for their tumultuous stories which ultimately conceded to the cardinal guidelines she held in her own life- love, family and duty. Still, it was Tibet's antiquity that anchored her in exile. It was phayul she longed for when her skin was scorched by the summer heat of India's plains. When she drank milk she compared it to the milk of her childhood for such sweetness and creaminess was not easily forgotten, and when she felt nauseous riding the buses that weaved their way around curvaceous mountain roads she spoke of the horses she had loved to ride. — Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

The second factor helping to bring the dissociative disorders back into the mainstream was the Vietnam War. For sociological reasons originating outside psychology and psychiatry, the Vietnam War and the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that arose from it were not forgotten when the veterans returned home, as had been the case in the two world wars and the Korean War. The realization that real, severe trauma could have serious long-term psychopathological consequences was forced on society as a whole by Vietnam. Once this principle was accepted, it as a short leap to the conclusion that severe childhood trauma might have serious sequelae lasting into adulthood. — Colin A. Ross

She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten — Stephen King

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope. — D.E. Stevenson

When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface ... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold. — Richard Louv

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. — Gaston Bachelard

She had forgotten his faults as we forget
the sorrows of our departed childhood. — George Eliot

This green place in which I stood with James turned slowly around us like a music box. All my memories returning, and all his. I could see and feel each of his days and he mine. Childhood songs, books read, hearts broken, arguments forgiven.The sweetness of these imperfections far outshining the regrets. Our lives overlapped as naturally as two blades of grass brushing together.
My pain forgotten, my clothes dry and clean, I pulled James close to me. As he lifted my chin, I felt no sensation of falling as when I had been Light touching one who is Quick. It wasn't the mere heat of a stolen moment in borrowed flesh. We touched now soul to soul, both of us Light. And when we kissed, the garden rocked, floating upstream. — Laura Whitcomb

Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood. — Mark Vonnegut

The poor lads called and called, but they were grown and had forgotten the best places to hide. — J. Anderson Coats

Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. — Carl Sagan

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood. — Orson Scott Card

Some pasts exist as a fog that rolls in and out of the present, formed not by air that condenses into mist but memories that condense into tiny doors that open to forgotten moments. Maybe you glance at a stranger on a crowded street who reminds you of a childhood friend or hear a song that was popular the first summer you fell in love, and in the space of that single beat of time you are flung backward to a who or when long past. And yet it is only for that one beat. Those tiny doors never remain open for long for most of us. They ensure our former times are kept as relics, and the dust upon them is wiped clean only occasionally — Billy Coffey

No one leaves his or her world without being transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in time and misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence, possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. A word for so long a time attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected- which as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also means refusal to risk. — Paulo Freire

I think of New York City lost in stars
forgotten as a blue haired pet of childhood love
Tonight the night is full; — Gregory Corso

The right to let childhood be forgotten 2 The right to a 'say' about his own life 3 The right to make mistakes, to find out for oneself 4 The right to have rules explained, not imposed 5 The right to have fun and companions 6 The right to question ideas 7 The right to be at the romantic age 8 The right to a fair chance and opportunity 9 The right to struggle toward his own philosophy of life 10 The right to professional help whenever necessary. — Ian Gilbert

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. — Jack Kerouac