Neighborhood Kids Quotes & Sayings

As a child, I loved to read books. The library was a window to the world, a pathway to worlds and people far from my neighborhood in Philadelphia. — Ed Bradley

It was endlessly entertaining, watching people beat each other up. All the little kids in the neighborhood would come and watch ... and then we'd beat them up as well. — Wayne Coyne

But, once again, when I said I'm so grateful for my mom just being adamant about me staying in public school - that is what allowed me to be exposed to so many different types of people. I went to a high school that was by the beach. I elected to do bussing my junior high school years. And my first year of high school, I would take the bus from my neighborhood to the beach schools. And at those schools, you had such a mix of so many types of kids. — Regina King

Red remembered growing up in that house as heaven. There were enough children on Bouton Road to form two baseball teams, when they felt like it, and they spent all their free time playing out of doors - boys and girls together, little ones and big ones. Suppers were brief, pesky interruptions foisted on them by their mothers. They disappeared again till they were called in for bed, and then they came protesting, all sweaty-faced and hot with grass blades sticking to them, begging for just another half hour. "I bet I can still name every kid on the block," Red would tell his own children. But that was not so impressive, because most of those kids had stayed on in the neighborhood as grown-ups, or at least come back to it later after trying out other, lesser places. Red — Anne Tyler

Except that wasn't all. The real fun began when a kite was cut. That was where the kite runners came in, those kids who chased the windblown kite drifting through the neighborhoods until it came spiraling down in a field, dropping in someone's yard, on a tree or a rooftop. The chase got pretty fierce; hordes of kite runners swarmed the streets, shoved past each other like those people from Spain I'd read about once, the ones who ran from the bulls. One year a neighborhood kid climbed a pine tree for a kite. A branch snapped under his weight and he fell thirty feet. Broke his back and never walked again. But he fell with the kite still in his hands. And when a kite runner has his hands on a kite, no one could take it from him. That wasn't a rule. That was a custom. — Khaled Hosseini

My house is made out of balsa wood, so when I want to scare the neighborhood kids I lift it over my head and tell them to get out of my yard or I'll throw it at them. — Steven Wright

I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids. — Steven Spielberg

When I looked around the neighborhood, I found out that kids wasn't the only crooks. We was surrounded by crooks, and plenty of 'em was guys that were supposed to be legit, like the landlords and the storekeepers and the politicians and cops on the beat. All of 'em was stealin' from somebody. And we had the real pros, the old Dons from the old country, with their big black cars and mustaches to match. We used to make fun of them behind their backs, but our parents were scared to death of them. The only thing is, we knew they was rich, and rich was what counted, because the rich got away with anythin'. — Martin Gosch

I don't know that there are real ghosts and goblins, But there are always more trick-or-treaters than neighborhood kids. — Robert Breault

We lived in a neighborhood that was too rich for us. When I was young, I had to deliver groceries to the homes of the kids I went to school with. I had to go to the back doors to make the deliveries. It was embarrassing. That was one thing out of a hundred. — Rodney Dangerfield

When I was a kid, I would make kung fu movies with the kids in the neighborhood, and I would be the guy behind the camera directing everybody, but they were all very silly little shorts and comedy bits. — Dan Fogler

I moved into this neighborhood, and I was walking on this beach with my kids, and we came across a sign that said, 'Water's polluted, no swimming.' And I didn't have any answers. — Ted Danson

I didn't like them when I heard them. I liked them even less when I met them. They look at us as though we smell and they don't. Of course, it doesn't matter whether I like them or not. There are other people in the neighborhood whom I don't like. But I don't trust the Payne-Parrishes. The kids seem all right, but the adults. ... I wouldn't want to have to depend on them. Not even for little things. — Octavia E. Butler

DYING IS NOT HOT
By Celia the Dark

Cool is no longer cool because cool is now hot,
and school isn't school if you are skipping.
Then the neighborhood is school and John,
the creepy dropout guy is teaching.

And it isn't cool because the cool kids stay in school,
where the other cool kids tell them them how hot they are
and they wouldn't want to miss a dance for cutting.

Kids who skip school were never cool or hot but
already dumped into the trashcan with leftover lunch pizza,
bruised into a locker, asking their parents for extra lunch money
so they can smoke and act like they never cared anyway.

And skipping school's not cool but it is school
because that's where they learn what the uncool learn
about life and dying. — Karen Finneyfrock

People in my neighborhood are so disconnected from the fresh food supply that kids don't know an eggplant from a sweet potato. We have to show them how to get grounded in the truest sense of the word. — Ron Finley

In my neighborhood in Springfield, Ohio, there were a lot of young kids. We all played tackle football after school, but I knew very early on that I was not an athlete. — John Legend

I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood. — Junot Diaz

Toddlers need to get off the soccer field and onto the playground. Children need to get out of the gym and into neighborhood stickball games. We need to give kids room to create their own rules, set their own terms, and move their bodies in their own ways. — Darell Hammond

It was-this always seems to shock people all over again- a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words at the neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand vivid things around me, Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost. — Tana French

I sometimes have birthday parties for the kids in my neighborhood and then pretend to suggest that I am going to molest them to the parents. It's a hilarious prank even though I am not a paedophile. — Thom Yorke

I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children's zoo. Last week, four kids escaped. — Rodney Dangerfield

I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun. — Alex Flinn

He loved baseball so much that he sometimes went home after a game, rounded up a few of the kids from the neighborhood, and played in the street until dark. — Jonathan Eig

In my Philly neighborhood, black and white kids hung together without even thinking about it. The spirit of Martin Luther King was alive and well. — Daryl Hall

I grew up in a slum neighborhood - rows of tenements, with stoops, and kids all over the street. It was a real neighborhood - we played kick-the-can and ring-a-levio. — Bonnie Bedelia

Near my house in Los Angeles is a waterfall. I love to take the wife and kids, but it's also near a sketchy neighborhood. So there's a lot of gang members that hang out at the waterfall. It's like somebody took an Ansel Adams photo and then put a Cypress Hill video inside it. — Al Madrigal

Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely to interact regularly only with kin and neighborhood children, which limits their formation of valuable weak ties. — Robert D. Putnam

I have a theory that musicians recognize each other and if they are destined to collaborate together they will. Mainly, they recognize each other according to the class they belong to. If they are punk-rocker kids from the neighborhood, they are going form a band. If they happen to be musicians that are going to play in pubs and restaurants, they are going to recognize each other, form a band and play together. If it's about musicians that are playing jazz and are going to jazz festivals, for e.g., then they are going to meet and work together. — Vlatko Stefanovski

Halloween's coming. Kids get very imaginative in my neighborhood. Last year, three kids showed up as Goldman Sachs executives and demanded 4.5 billion pieces of candy. — Jay Leno

When I was a kid I started a baseball team. I was a terrible player, but I put together a group of neighborhood kids. I started a hockey team. I put the kids together and got a sponsor. So I can always kind of organize people and get things done. — Jerry Bruckheimer

Enrolling your child in a recreational sport sponsored by your neighborhood recreation community centers is a great way to keep kids active. — Lee Haney

I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center. — John Dufresne

It was a great place to grow up. There were always kids around in our neighborhood. We had a basketball hoop in the back of our house, a little front yard where you could get touch football games going. I know you think of it as a big city, but it was fun for me to grow up in New Orleans. I remember it as a very normal childhood. — Eli Manning

When the kids were little, she and Zoe had been friends with another mom in the neighborhood, and this lady's kid was so horrible that they both mentioned it to her, that he seemed like a miniature serial killer in training, and she stopped speaking to them. Pretty soon she moved out of the neighborhood, and Elizabeth guessed it was to move closer to whatever prison facility her son was bound to wind up in. People just didn't want to hear it. — Emma Straub

When I was younger, living in an all-black neighborhood the other kids thought I was better than them because of my light skin and straight hair. Then we moved to an all-white neighborhood and that was a culture shock ... I'd been used to being around all black kids. — Halle Berry

You know, growing up, I lived in a neighborhood in Long Island where there was basically one black family. And I remember hearing all the parents and the kids in the neighborhood say racist things about this family. — Lorraine Bracco

I used to walk around with a stick. My dad used to call me Moses. It's on a home video. He said, 'That kid would rather lead no one than follow anyone.' I had dogs following me in the neighborhood. I had neighborhood kids coming over. — Brad D. Smith

When I was a kid, everybody in the neighborhood picked me to be the one in jail or be in the cemetery by the time I was 20. — Bo Jackson

The summer I was ten years old, there was a group of kids in my neighborhood who played together every night after dinner. I often watched them from my window ... Every night around nine-thirty or ten, those kids would get called in one by one ... I knew the first ones called were full of resentment. But they needn't have been. Nothing ever happened after they left anyway. Things just sort of ended in a slow motion way, like petals falling off a flower. You couldn't have people leave like that and have anything good happen afterward. Whoever was left couldn't pay much attention to anything other than waiting for their turn to get called in. So, it wasn't so bad to go first, to head back toward those deep yellow lights and beds made up with summer linens. It was much better than being last, when you would be left standing there alone, finally going in without anybody calling you. — Elizabeth Berg

I grew up in a tough neighborhood where a lot of kids were older than me. The older kids decided to pick me on me starting when I was about 6 and it didn't take me long to take a stand for myself. — Bo Jackson

I was watching 'Mr. Roger's Neighborhood', 'Sesame Street', 'Electric Company', 'Romper Room', and 'Villa Alegre!' when I said to my self, 'Hey, self! Wouldn't it be fun to be one of those kids on the TV?' My mom thought it was a pretty good idea, too ... and she instantly moved us from the Bay Area to Malibu ... nice. — Keith Coogan

After the raid, the neighborhood was officially repossessed by the city of Portland, and a number of the houses were razed. The plan was to set up new low-income condos for some of the municipal workers, but construction stalled after the terrorist incidents, and as I cross over into the Highlands, all I see is rubble: holes in the ground, and trees felled and left with their roots exposed to the sky, dirty, churned earth, and rusting metal signs declaring it a hard-hat area.
It's so quiet that even the sound of my wheels as they turn seems overloud. A thought comes to me suddenly, unbidden - Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie - the old rhyme we used to whisper as kids when we passed a graveyard.
A graveyard: That's exactly what the Highlands is like now. — Lauren Oliver

Did you ever think that in a past life Alec was an old woman with ninety cats who was always yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off her lawn? Because I do, — Cassandra Clare

I was still a newlywed and certainly wasn't to the point where I felt comfortable yelling, "I'm going to shit my pants any second!"
But the sweating had started, which was followed by the tears. "I'm not feeling well, and need to get home," I told him.
"Ok, but I have to obey the speed limit because of all the kids in the neighborhood," he replied.
I was pleading with him to hurry up when he came to a complete stop.
I screamed at him, "Why are we stopping?"
He rolled down the window. "Retreat."
I could see the flag lowering in the distance, the beautiful orange sun setting behind it.
In the opposite direction I could see the roof line of our home - so close, yet so far away.
As Retreat played, I surrendered. I pooped my pants. I took one for the flag.
Now that's patriotism. — Mollie Gross

Really, I think that going out and playing with your friends is kind of becoming a lost art, with the kids in the neighborhood. — Frank Shorter

I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents. — Marian Wright Edelman

I lived in an all-black neighborhood, followed by an all-white one, and other kids in the always called me Mexican in both neighborhoods. — Cheech Marin

We need better neighbors, neighbors that care about the schools in their neighborhood whether they have kids in them or not, because they know that the health and vitality of that neighborhood depends on it. — Thomas Friedman

I was an only, and often lonely, child. After they'd had me, my parents, who'd met back in Pakistan when they were both around forty, had decided against tempting fate a second time. I remember how I would eye with envy all the kids in our neighborhood, in my school, who had a little brother or sister. How bewildered I was by the way some of them treated each other, oblivious to their own good luck. They acted like wild dogs. Pinching, hitting, pushing, betraying one another any way they could think of. Laughing about it too. They wouldn't speak to one another. I didn't understand. Me, I spent most of my early years craving a sibling. — Khaled Hosseini

People lived in the same apartments for years. You'd meet a group of kids in kindergarten, and you'd still be with them in high school. No one ever left the neighborhood. — Fran Drescher

One resourceful mom took her son's fixation on the video game Minecraft and made real wood "Minecraft" blocks for her son and the neighborhood kids to play with. This provided a connection between building things in the virtual world and building structures in the real world. — Rich Weinfeld

I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi. — Robert Frost

Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Met two young guys from the Oregon National Guard ... The lieutenant told me about their temporary barracks in an old neighborhood high school. He told me that he was disgusted that kids ever went to school there, and that in Oregon the place would have been bulldozed and rebuilt so that kids could have a proper place to learn. He seemed troubled that all of this was happening in America. He realized that many of the problems he was seeing in New Orleans existed before the storm, and he wanted to know why people had put up with it and why they hadn't voted out of office the people who had let this happen. I told him I didn't know, but maybe we could change things in New Orleans in the future. He seemed hopeful. I felt less certain. — Billy Sothern

When people ask where I studied to be an ambassador, I say my neighborhood and my school. I've tried to tell my kids that you don't wait until you're in high school or college to start dealing with problems of people being different. The younger you start, the better. — Andrew Young

It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year's salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks' paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked
because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed? — Michael Moore

We left my birthplace, Brooklyn, New York, in 1939 when I was 13. I enjoyed the ethnic variety and the interesting students in my public school, P.S. 134. The kids in my neighborhood were only competitive in games, although unfriendly gangs tended to define the limits of our neighborhood. — Irwin Rose

When I was a little kid, I was the first kid in my neighborhood to have a pet alligator. — Benicio Del Toro

You know, when I was a young boy I used to play baseball in my back yard or in the street with my brothers or the neighborhood kids. We used broken bats and plastic golf balls and played for hours and hours. — Robin Yount

A white college student from a private college goes into a poor neighborhood and volunteers four hours a week and that's considered exemplary. [Whereas] a poor kid who lives in that community and takes care of all the kids in that neighborhood four hours every day is not seen as a volunteer. — Patricia Hill Collins

Some mothers see their job as preparing their kids to live in the big old world. To be independent, to marry and have children of their own. To live wherever they choose and do what makes them happy. That's love. Others, and we all see them, cling to their children. Move to the same city, the same neighborhood. Live through them. Stifle them. Manipulate, use guilt-trips, cripple them.' 'Cripple them? How?' 'By not teaching them to be independent. — Louise Penny

I wanted to be that cranky old guy that stands on his porch and yells at the neighborhood kids. — Robert Lansing

Even in my neighborhood, the kids come to me for interviews for their term papers. I ask them later what grades they got, and they're always A-pluses. — Stephanie Kwolek

That should be the goal, is that every kid in every neighborhood, despite whatever challenges they may face, are getting a great education in our public schools. — Michelle Rhee

My thing was always trying to do as much as I possibly could do. I wanted to do all the things the other kids did in the neighborhood. — Stevie Wonder

Before I decided to concentrate on writing, I drew pictures and painted, and made Super 8 experimental movies. I was the singer in three rock bands, and I wrote and staged and acted in plays for kids in my neighborhood. So I was kind of all over the place in my interests and far-flung in terms of where my creativity wanted to end up. — Dennis Cooper

I skated and rode bikes on ramps, and my mom was always super supportive. She was one of the only divorced moms in the neighborhood, so all the other parents looked down upon her for letting her kids do that kind of thing. — Spike Jonze

Dad used to tell me about the guys at the VFW who could feel their amputated limbs. I feel like one of those guys-wiggling my weak tortured, pathetic self from only a month ago even though I've amputated him.
It's a little like being two people at once. One minute I feel like the old Lucky who had nothing, and the next minute I realize I have everything I could possibly need.
While I'm in the driveway, I hear the neighborhood kids playing. Normal kids doing normal things. They probably don't know that as of today more than 1,700 servicemen have still not been accounted for. They probably don't know that about 8,000 are still missing from Korea, or that approximately 74,000 never surfaced after World War II. They don't know that amputees sometimes try to wiggle limbs they lost.
I don't envy them. They have a lot to learn. — A.S. King

When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn't get in trouble in his neighborhood. — Hedi Slimane

In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate. — Barry Glassner

I know when people think of New York, they think of theater, restaurants, cultural landmarks and shopping," I told him. "But beyond the iconic skyline and the news from Wall Street, New York is a collection of villages. In our neighborhoods, we attend school, play Kick the Can, handball and ride our bikes. I grew up knowing the names and faces of the baker, the shoe repair family, the Knish man and the Good Humor man who sold me and the other kids in my neighborhood half a popsicle for a nickel. My father took me to the playground where he pushed me on the swing, helped balance me on the seesaw and watched as I hung upside down by my feet on the monkey bars. Yes," I told the interviewer, "people actually grow up in New York. — Gina Greenlee

SCHOOL BEGINS IN August this year. I live nearby, and so I walk and skip the bus. I read while I walk to school up the two hills, one sidewalk, a more or less straight line. I pretend the streets I pass through are empty. I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag. See me. I am five feet and two inches tall. I am still thin, freckled, large eyes, small nose. My hair waves and grows long, to my neck. I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die. Help — Alexander Chee

When the kids see the poverty in their neighborhood, but they see these successful kids who come from the countries they come from, come from Mexico, come from Korea, come from the Philippines, come from Salvador, and were doing really well, it motivates them to do better. The former students give them a vision of what's possible. — Rafe Esquith

We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana-seat bikes and minibikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living-room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and sighed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. We will never be that way, we said, we will never say those things. — Jill McCorkle

Even as a kid, I was a businessman. I figured out that if you plucked all the berries off my neighbor's tree and smashed them up, they made a Nickelodeon Gak-type consistency. I sold them to all the neighborhood kids and made stacks of quarters. Of course, the berries were poisonous, and I got in all types of trouble. — Adam DeVine

As a kid, I loved leading 'dance camp' in my garage for the neighborhood kids. I would choreograph really intricate routines for us to perform. It was so much fun! — Daniella Monet

I don't see anything wrong with a neighborhood association wanting to keep their neighborhood a certain way or their apartment complex a certain way. I don't see anything wrong with white kids wanting to go to school with white children, or black kids wanting to go to school with black kids. — David Duke

Ever since I was 7 years old, I was writing. I remember being in the basement of my house, this dank, horrible basement, putting on plays with not-very-willing participants, and I would promise kids in the neighborhood that I'd play Nintendo 64 with them after we'd rehearse this stupid play that I wrote. — John Francis Daley

I was never a 'bad' kid, but I did get into minor juvenile trouble. Look, I grew up in Brooklyn. This was the '60s, and the neighborhood was rapidly changing and not without its problems. All the kids of the neighborhood 'did their thing,' breaking windows and the like. I was no different. — William Forsythe

Some kids spent their allowance going to see 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'; I spent mine on a great-looking lamp I'd found at the flea market and a ceramic bowl from a neighborhood garage sale. — Nate Berkus

You kids have fun, and be home by Thanksgiving! our parents would call to us on Halloween night, as we staggered out the front door, weighed down by hundreds of pounds of concealed vandalism supplies, including enough raw eggs to feed Somalia for decades. By morning, thanks to our efforts, the entire neighborhood would be covered with a layer of congealed shaving cream and toilet paper that, around certain unpopular neighbors' homes, was hundreds of feet thick. This is how the Appalachian Mountains were formed. — Dave Barry

Growing up, I absolutely loved skateboarding and dirt bike riding with my brother and the neighborhood kids. — Daniella Monet

I think the education system is great just the way it is. There's kids in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, seven years old, that can already speak fluent Spanish. — Kevin Nealon

I think people are frustrated with dysfunction, not just dysfunction in government, but a lot of dysfunction that surrounds them. I get the frustration with drugs in the neighborhood or my kids with big college loans can't find a job. — John Kasich

By birth, certainly, they were not prepared in any way to achieve their desires. They were not the smartest kids in the neighborhood. They were not born the richest. They weren't even the toughest. In fact, they lacked almost all the necessary talents that might have helped them satisfy the appetites of their dreams, except one - their talent for violence. — Nicholas Pileggi

For years I didn't realize this because so many others had more. We were surrounded by extreme affluence, which tricks you into thinking you're in the middle of the pack. I mean, sure, we have twenty-four hundred square feet for only five humans to live in, but our kids have never been on an airplane, so how rich could we be? We haven't traveled to Italy, my kids are in public schools, and we don't even own a time-share. (Roll eyes here.) But it gets fuzzy once you spend time with people below your rung. I started seeing my stuff with fresh eyes, realizing we had everything. I mean everything. We've never missed a meal or even skimped on one. We have a beautiful home in a great neighborhood. Our kids are in a Texas exemplary school. We drive two cars under warranty. We've never gone a day without health insurance. Our closets are overflowing. We throw away food we didn't eat, clothes we barely wore, trash that will never disintegrate, stuff that fell out of fashion. — Jen Hatmaker

Every city has a neighborhood like this one, where you can buy sex or marijuana or a parrot that talks dirty, where the men sit talking on stoops like those men across the street, where the women always seem to be yelling for their kids to come in unless they want a whipping, and where the wine always comes in a paper sack. — Stephen King

I remember how I would eye with envy all the kids in our neighborhood, in my school, who had a little brother or sister. How bewildered I was by the way some of them treated each other, oblivious to their own good luck. They acted like wild dogs. Pinching, hitting, pushing, betraying one another any way they could think of. Laughing about it too. They wouldn't speak to one another. I didn't understand. Me, I spent most of my early years craving a sibling. What I really wished I had was a twin, someone who'd cried next to me in the crib, slept beside me, fed from Mother's breast with me. Someone to love helplessly and totally, and in whose face I could always find myself. — Khaled Hosseini

I was about seven years old. In my mother's garage I used to create plays and star in them and charge the neighborhood kids five cents to see them. It was a lot of fun. — Franny Armstrong

About a month ago some kids in my neighborhood were playing hide-and-go-seek and one of them ended up in an abandoned refrigerator. It's all anybody talked about for weeks. I said, 'Who cares? How many kids you know get to die a winner? — Anthony Jeselnik

Here it is undeveloped, a roll of film with all its mysteries locked up. I never took it anyplace, just left it waiting in a drawer dreaming of stars. That was our time, to see if Lottie Carson was who we thought she was, all those shots we took, cracking up, kissing with our mouths open, laughing, but we never finished it. We thought we had time, running after her, jumping on the bus and trying to glimpse her dimple through the tired nurses arguing in scrubs and the moms on the phone with the groceries in the laps of the kids in the strollers. We hid behind the mailboxes and lampposts half a block away as she kept moving through her neighborhood, where I've never been, the sky getting dark on only the first date, thinking all the while we'd develop it later. — Daniel Handler

I entered high school she[ my mother] said, "Well, you're a teenager now, and comics are for kids, so you shouldn't read them anymore," and I went, "Oh, okay," and I gave away what, of course, would now be thousands of dollars worth of comics to the neighborhood kids. — Trina Robbins

When I was about five my dad built a stage for me in our basement. A full stage, with a curtain, a backdrop and a dressing room. There were three colored spotlights - a red one, a white one, and a blue one. Blue was for nighttime scenes, and red was for when we were in hell. If the neighborhood kids wanted to use the stage, they had to incorporate me into the play. — Paul Reubens

Mikolay and Julia live in the same neighborhood and go to
the same school every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. — Magda M. Olchawska