Quotes & Sayings About Having A 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

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

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folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

A happy childhood is hard to overcome. — Marty Rubin

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

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

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