Quotes & Sayings About Hard Childhood

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

One's age should be tranquil, as childhood should be playful. Hard work at either extremity of life seems out of place. At midday the sun may burn, and men labor under it; but the morning and evening should be alike calm and cheerful. — Thomas Arnold

If you can't find any fun during childhood, you naturally won't look for it as you grow up to maturity. You will grow 'hard,' and look upon fun as foolish. Also, if you don't furnish fun for a child, don't look for it to grow up bright, happy and loving. So, always put in a child's path an opportunity to watch, talk about, and know, as many good things as you can. — Ernest Vincent Wright

The sword was called Kaledvoulc'h, which means hard lightning, though Igraine prefers to call it Excaliber, and I shall call it so as well because Arthur never cared what name his longsword carried. Nor, did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. "What is the egg to the eagle?" he asked me, then said that he had been born, he had lived, and he had become a soldier, and that was all I needed to know. — Bernard Cornwell

One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths "for your own good." Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible ... — Robin Wasserman

I am closer and closer to reaching my childhood dream. This is really exciting! I will continue to work hard, to focus on each tournament I play. — Yani Tseng

I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.
Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. As obligation to feel can freeze feelings. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said) — C.S. Lewis

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

Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better.
Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he had yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid's mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son's hand. I see the pain I've caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam's body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone. — George Saunders

Before you judge me , try hard to love me , look within your heart
Then ask , - have you seen my childhood ? — Michael Jackson

I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think. It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It took becoming a man to realize how lucky I'd been. It took a few hard knocks in life to make me realize the only thing my dad had ever wanted or worked for was to give me a chance at being better than him. — Tucker Elliot

My whole childhood was like: Work hard, be quiet, respect elderly people, respect your parents, and just be unobtrusive. — Mindy Kaling

When I missed the physical body of my partner, I meditated on its parts, tossed by the waves, torn, dispersed, and deteriorated. When memories of our lives together became acute and intense, I breathed. I breathed through each wave of yearning, of regret, of guilt, of what-could-have-been. Every time I asked him, "Where are you?" A quiet voice immediately responded, "I am here. I have never left you." I did not only lose a partner. I lost my childhood all over again. I lost my soul mate. I lost the accepting father and the gentle mother that he was to me. I lost the dream of a "normal life," which I had tried so hard to achieve. Now I had to face my own mind. — Dang Nghiem

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. — John Steinbeck

It wasn't my childhood fantasy to work with Truffaut or be in obscure films. I like Midnight Run better than I like The Bicycle Thief. It was films like Die Hard and Bladerunner that made me want to be an actor. — Ben Affleck

Every working family in America knows how hard it is today to find affordable childcare or early childhood education. — Bernie Sanders

The hard thin body of my childhood was just beginning to miraculously soften like the cracked ground of wadi when rain falls. — Rinsai Rossetti

From early childhood, I had been told how smart I was, and throughout my life various people had tried so hard to teach me everything there was to know. But it occurred to me then how negligent they had been in teaching me how to love. I had two example of love in life - my mother's, absolute and over- burdened, the trial of love; and my father's, the cold and ambitious pursuit of meaning in love, the desire to turn it into a product with a worth that could be measured. Of the two options, I had skewed towards the former, disappointed with my father's method, and so I had bestowed a sort of unconditional love on Carly without really understanding what it meant. I wished that just one person had taught me a way to love her less. If I had loved her less, maybe I wouldn't have hated her so much. And maybe then I could have forgiven her. — Anna Jarzab

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child? — Mitch Albom

It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard. — Dionne Brand

We had a great childhood and boyhood. It was a wonderful time through those years. A lot of it was through the Depression years, when things were tough, but my dad always had a job. But I had a great time. I was kind of restless, and I had a hard time staying in school all day, so me and a few pals would duck out and go out on these various adventures. — James Arness

The whole point about childhood," Domenica went on, "is that it affords us a brief moment of innocence and protection from the pressures of the world. Parents who push their children too hard intrude on that little bit of space. — Alexander McCall Smith

You survived by seizing every tiny drop of love you could find anywhere, and milking it, relishing it, for all it was worth. And as you grew up, you sought love, anywhere you could find it, whether it was a teacher or a coach or a friend or a friend's parents. You sought those tiny droplets of love, basking in them when you found them. They sustained you. For all these years, you've lived under the illusion that somehow, you made it because you were tough enough to overpower the abuse, the hatred, the hard knocks of life. But really you made it because love is so powerful that tiny little doses of it are enough to overcome the pain of the worst things life can dish out. Toughness was a faulty coping mechanism you devised to get by. But, in reality, it has been your ability to never give up, to keep seeking love, and your resourcefulness to make that love last long enough to sustain you. That is what has gotten you by. — Rachel Reiland

Whether or not the abuser's hand has actually pressed against our labia--or slammed into our face--our identity as women is constituted by the threat of violence. From childhood we are made to understand that other people will try to control our bodies, and that many will succeed. Unlike boys, we are never taught to fight back when our physical self-sovereignty is threatened. That is why our identity is an identity of incoherence, and why it's so hard to give it up to the other's mouth or her hand or just the universe watching as you lose control by yourself. Losing control of our sexual feelings can be so devastating that we fear we'll lose something even more central to us: our moral integrity. — Donna Minkowitz

I learned that we may meet a true love and that our lives may be transformed by such an encounter even when it does not lead to sexual pleasure, committed bonding, or even sustained contact. The myth of true love-that fairy-tale vision of two souls who meet, join, and live happily ever thereafter-is the stuff of childhood fantasy. Yet many of us, female and male, carry these fantasies into adulthood and are unable to cope with the reality of what it means to either have an intense life-altering connection that will not lead to an ongoing relationship or to be in a relationship. True love does not always lead to happily ever after, and even when it does sustaining love still takes work. — Bell Hooks

Sometimes it was hard for me to connect the boy I knew - the skinny smart kid who collected lead soldiers and pursued Boy Scout merit badges - with the phenomenally successful man he'd become. But sooner or later, when we were together, some remark would inevitably trigger childhood memories and then we'd be off, zipping down a path that existed now only for the two of us. — Alice Steinbach

You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case "head drive" that starts the corruption of the files. — Nikki Sixx

The burdens of childhood are as hard to bear as the crosses that weigh us down later in life, while the happinesses of childhood are tame compared with those of our maturer years. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father's temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic. — Han Kang

I was born in 1953, in Paris. But soon after my birth my family (I have one sister) moved into a rent apartment in suburbs of Paris named Romainville. That time my parents were freshly married and it was extremely hard to find an apartment in Paris for a young married couple. To say they found a flat in a blocks of houses which was built after the second World War - and this is the place where I spent my childhood. — Richard Clayderman

It's hard, omigod remember? Being a kid. — Erica Lorraine Scheidt

The accent is a really hard thing for me. It reminds me of my family and my childhood, but it's one of the worst-sounding accents out there. I love Boston, but we sound like idiots. — Amy Poehler

The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries of riot and the bars of my own cell rattle with pain, the warden drops a soft book on the floor, solace in its pages: the collected poems of Walt Whitman. And oh, my favorites, like the tastes of childhood. Every few months the warden passes me The White Dawn, and for a few precious days I traverse the open heavens on hard-packed moonlit snow and see the blue splashing arctic lights, and I fill my belly with frozen seal meat and laugh with my Inuit friends. — Rene Denfeld

Why is it...that the good things that pop up almost always get clobbered by these miserable darn things that seem to choke out everything like stinkweed? — A. E. Hotchner

It's been such a huge part of my life, it's hard for me to separate it out. All I can say is that I had an extraordinary childhood. I was around these amazing people and went to exotic locations. The whole movie-making thing is so magical. — Barbara Broccoli

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side. — Heather O'Neill

I had a hard childhood. Hard for my parents. Not that bad for me. — Michael Grant

In New York, I would walk down shadowy sidewalks dreaming of the openness of central Ohio, yearning for roads flanked by fields, for their freedom and isolation. These roads cradled me. I realized this now. I'd been trying to hate Ohio, because it was so hard to be at home. But the land had actually always been there for me all along. As a child, the moon had lit my room on sad nights. I'd wandered cornfields and puttered around at Lehman's Pond. Those were some of my best childhood memories. — Julie Barton

Childhood love can endure but childhood promises are hard to keep. — Barry Walsh

It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction. — Ayelet Waldman

My childhood was safe and sane. No abuse and no traumas. I was surrounded by a large and loving family who taught me the importance of hard work and a meaningful education. — Ronnie James Dio

I pride myself on being steady and unruffled even with my friends, and so I'm trying to get myself together, but goddamn, it is hard. They're making a movie out of my childhood ideas. — Christina Lauren

I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation. — Mary Oliver

The mere exposure effect explains many facets of our lives, such as why it's so hard to find someone who can prepare our childhood favorites like Mom did, and it also holds when we see the latest fashion trends prominently featured in stores, catalogs, and finally on people we know.
In addition, when a trend emerges, it sends the message that it's becoming increasingly accepted. When we see the supplies of multiple independent retailers simultaneously shift in one way, we assume the demand has shifted as well. Of course, the change may actually be driven by the prediction of a future shift in demand, which may or may not materialize, but it still affects people's choices. — Sheena Iyengar

When I was traded from the Oakland A's to the Atlanta Braves before the 2005 season, a childhood dream was realized. I grew up a Braves fan just a few hours south of Atlanta, and it was hard for me to believe that I was going to actually play for the Atlanta Braves and legendary manager Bobby Cox. — Tim Hudson

Father taught me to like wht he called 'discussion', she recalled. Margaret Thatcher never repudiated the Methodism of her childhood, with its reverence for truth-telling, hard work and puting into practice the teachings of Scripture. page 6 — Charles Moore

The whole narcissism and echo syndrome is usually the result of early childhood training. Those are very hard habits for anyone to break. — Merrill Markoe

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose. — Garrison Keillor

I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can't depend on people. "I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat," Lindsay [his half-sister] once said. "They don't care about their kids; they don't provide; they just disappear, and it's not that hard to make them go. — J.D. Vance

Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need : a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, it's very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven,you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often ) and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven (Et tous nos amours, Emmanuele was sobbing face down), the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment,
when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you're into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too. — Julio Cortazar

With the refinements that come with maturity the smells faded out, to be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable smell - the odour of cunt. More particularly the odour that lingers on the fingers after playing with a woman, for, if it has not been noticed before, this smell is even more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carried with it the perfume of the past tense, than the odour of the cunt itself. But this odour, which belongs to maturity, is but a faint odour compared with the odours attaching to childhood. It is an odour which evaporates, almost as quickly in the mind's imagination, as in reality. One can remember many things about the woman one has loved but it is hard to remember the smell of her cunt - with anything like certitude. The smell of wet hair, on the other hand, a woman's wet hair, is much more powerful and lasting - why, I don't know. — Henry Miller

It's tragic. The wounds that humans get are so strong that they're like robots operating on childhood programming. And even if they learn the truth about themselves in therapy and rehab, they still cling to their false beliefs and make choices that don't serve them - over and over again." He shakes his head at the cosmic absurdity of it all. "It takes hard, conscious, diligent work to genuinely change. — Neil Strauss

My parents are good role models because they've worked hard and gave me a happy childhood. — Sophie Ellis-Bextor

So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little Mary had to be the chicken and Savannah shoved her out of the loft and broke her collarbone. The hearts of children are hard naturally because of their short memories. Everything they play with becomes true and unquestionable such as an acorn cap for a Holy Grail, such is the power of the untrained mind, and all our training of it is both of advantage and not. — Paulette Jiles

We shall forever be battling our scars, healing ourselves from the deep scars of childhood, to the awkward scars of adolescence, the hard scars of adulthood and scars of frail old age. In the answering spark in another's eyes, the cosy laughter of friends, and the circle of family, we rush to heal, heal our scars. In the eyes of a complete stranger, we finally find our balm until they are a stranger no more, and then we scar again, only to bleed again. — Srividya Srinivasan

The myth of childhood happiness flourishes so wildly not because it satisfies the needs of children but because it satisfies the needs of adults. In a culture of alienated people, the belief that everyone has at least one good period in life free of care and drudgery dies hard. And obviously you can't expect it in your old age. So it must be you've already had it. — Shulamith Firestone

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

It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence. — Evelyn Waugh

I have worked very hard on being aware of my childhood but moving forward and not letting it bring me down emotionally. That is a hard thing - especially when you have children of your own and you remember what happened to you at that age. — Samantha Morton

He had a passion for cricket right from his childhood and liked nothing else but playing with the bat and the ball. I wanted him to study hard and get into a government service. But, he wanted to do something in cricket and earn a name for himself. — Bill Vaughan

We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don't have public support for things like preschools. — Alison Gopnik

I had a hard-scrabble childhood with my parents. I have a lot of baggage. To come down to the footlights and accept the audience's affection inside a Broadway theater - that didn't come easily to me. — Bette Midler

I have a lot of anger about my childhood - being hard of hearing and my relationship with my father. — Lou Ferrigno

Children's lives are fiendishly hard. Adults, having survived childhood, turn their minds to the future, and if they have a choice, generally retain only the rosiest of childhood memories. — Gregory MacGuire

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. — C.S. Lewis

She tried so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all. — George R R Martin

A happy childhood is hard to overcome. — Marty Rubin

Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night. — Elena Ferrante

I had a wonderful childhood, which is tough because it's hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood. — Larry David

I just think that beautiful people don't have it as hard, you know? They just don't know what rejection's like. That's why super models aren't good actresses, because they don't need anything. If someone is beautiful and she's needy, she's probably had a terrible childhood. — Rob Schneider

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over. — Edward Hirsch

It is hard to explain to a privileged child the difference between freedom and captivity. For him, the world functions differently, all rains bear fruits and all men are free. He catches a golden bird and puts it inside a gold cage. He watches it grow, captivated, unaware that with its beautiful body comes a pair of wings that can set it free. — Kanza Javed

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things. — Carson McCullers

I've always been serious that way, trying to evolve to a more conscious state. Funny thing about that,though. You tweak yourself,looking for more love, less lust, more compassion, less jealousy. You keep tweaking, keep adjusting those knobs until you can no longer find the original settings. In some sense,the original settings are exactly what I'm looking for-a return to the easygoing guy i was before my world got complicated, the nice guy who took things as they came and laughed so hard the blues would blow away in the summer wind. — Bill Withers

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

I'll kill him for you."
He sounded so sincere, and so accepting of her dysfunctional childhood, that a smile bloomed in Priss's heart. "Thank you." She drew him down to her for a longer kiss, one he gladly accepted. "That's sweet of you, but no."
His eyes narrowed. "Sweet? I offer to kill a man and you think it's sweet?"
"You wanted to kill him anyway. And so do I." The hard on his chest fascinated her, so she concentrated on that. "You've never come right out and said so, but I've known for a while that you're a good guy, Trace."
He gave her a cautious survey. "I'm not sure that accurately describes me. — Lori Foster

One day at a time. Maybe it wasn't such bad advice. Despite what she'd learned in childhood, change could be good, right? If she could just let loose and let it happen. The thought sent a tremor of fear through her. She'd learned early to hold on tightly, to control her surroundings, her feelings. But control didn't buy safety. She couldn't even control her feelings, much less anything else. Control was a false foundation that crumbled and left her vulnerable. She didn't need to control. She needed to let go and trust God, and that was hard. But he was her new foundation. She pictured it beneath her, solid and unwavering. It would be okay. — Denise Hunter

Now this is a most satisfactory and important thing to think about, for brutality will not, - cannot, - accomplish what a kindly disposition will; and, if folks could only know how quickly a "balky" child will, through loving and cuddling, grow into a charming, happy youth, much childish gloom and sorrow would vanish; for a man or woman who is ugly to a child is too low to rank as highly as a wild animal; for no animal will stand, for an instant, anything approaching an attack, or any form of harm to its young. But what a lot of tots find slaps, yanks and hard words for conditions which do not call for such harsh tactics! No child is naturally ugly or "cranky." And big, gulping sobs, or sad, unhappy young minds, in a tiny body should not occur in any community of civilization. Adulthood holds many an opportunity for such conditions. Childhood should not. — Ernest Vincent Wright

I'd like to go back to five years old again. Just sometimes. To be turning over rocks and looking for pill bugs and holding earthworms, playing dolls, erecting forts, digging through dirt for marbles, burrowing in leaf piles, failing at igloo building, when my biggest concern was going to sleep with the lights off. I wish I was five again, before things got hard, before I was forced to grow up way too early and been stuck in this "adult" thing way too long. I wish I could sit in my Grandpa's lap and let him sing me crazy Irish songs and go over the names of the planets. "Gwampa, tell me about Outer Space." ... "Gwampa, sing the Swimming Song."
I wish I could go back there, just for a little while, and pick raspberries by myself in the sun and find secret hideaways and not hurt, not worry, not carry the heavy things. If I could be five years old ... just for a few minutes. Remember what it felt like to be free. That would be something. — Jennifer DeLucy

It's hard to say. Sometimes people have had terrible childhoods. And sometimes they just haven't found their special place in life. And sometimes they're dogs from hell and must be destroyed. — Charles Addams

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

The idea of a personal God who protects us, loves us, and then punishes us by not allowing us into Heaven, but instead casts us into Hell for eternity if we haven't met his standards of living, is so outlandish that it can only be taught to children who don't know any better - which, by the way, is how it's done. If a person hasn't been introduced to this mythical idea about God in early childhood, he or she becomes increasingly hard to preach to. — Gudjon Bergmann

In this world of human affairs there is no worse nuisance than a boy at the age of fourteen. He is neither ornamental nor useful. It is impossible to shower affection on him as on a little boy; and he is always getting in the way. If he talks with a childish lisp he is called a baby, and if he answers in a grown-up way he is called impertinent. In fact any talk at all from him is resented. Then he is at the unattractive, growing age. He grows out of his clothes with indecent haste; his voice grows hoarse and breaks and quavers; his face grows suddenly angular and unsightly. It is easy to excuse the shortcomings of early childhood, but it is hard to tolerate even unavoidable lapses in a boy of fourteen. — Rabindranath Tagore

I think some of the funniest and most artistic people I know are the ones who had a hard time at school. They often have humility and artistry. So, as much as I feel bad for kids who have to go through a rough childhood, I believe that if they can turn it around, it's going to make them better people later on. — Drew Barrymore

I have worked hard since my childhood and worked as a labourer. I put my mind and heart into it. — Narendra Modi

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else
an adult, an animal. — Joyce Carol Oates

By trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we're just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up, — Lori Gottlieb

Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy — Nikki Giovanni

Emily knew she was going to cry. She tried to avert it with a childhood trick that had sometimes worked before - pressing both thumbnails hard into the tender flesh beneath the nails of her index fingers, so that the self-inflicted pain might be greater than the ache of her swelling throat - but it was no use. — Richard Yates

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. — Heather O'Neill

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

This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes. — Nina LaCour

The fact is that one moves through life like someone moving with a lantern in a dark woods. A bit of the path ahead is illuminated, and a bit of the path behind. But the darkness follows hard on one's steps, and envelopes our trails as one proceeds. Were one to be able, as one never is, to retrace the steps by daylight, one would find that the terrain traversed bears, in reality, little relationship to what imagination and memory pictured. We are, toward the end of our lives, such different people, so far removed from the childhood figures with whom our identity links us, that the bond to those figures, like that of nations to their obscure prehistoric origins, is almost irrelevant. — George F. Kennan

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another. — F Scott Fitzgerald

As an adult, it's hard for me to remember my mother before her sickness. But if I go back into childhood, I can access that. — Bruce Eric Kaplan