Quotes & Sayings About Remembering Childhood

Though her head was aching too much for her to reason with herself, she could think of nice things - the Cumberland hills, her lambs, her Nannie, who had taught her this trick of detachment. "When you're sick or sorry, child" she had said, "think of other things as much as you are able. It's just practice, Start young and you'll get the trick of it." And most astonishingly, after a little while of going back to childhood and remembering Nannie in her blue print dress, with her white apron on and her sleeves rolled up, turning on the bath-water and humming a little song as she did it, she fell asleep. — Elizabeth Goudge

I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood. — Gordon Parks

Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being loved, of being embraced, was gone. Somehow the test of manhood, men told me, was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief. Sadly, tragically, these men in great numbers were remembering a primal moment of heartbreak and heartache: the moment that they were compelled to give up their right to feel, to love, in order to take their place as patriarchal men. — Bell Hooks

Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father.

It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows. — N.K. Jemisin

Children make you confront your own childhood. Which I think is common. Suddenly you're remembering your own parents as parents, not to mention the fact that you're confronted by them as grandparents. So you also have that terrible shock, a mirror image of your own. You suddenly seem to be so helpless in the face of young children. And you think, "How did you ever bring up me?" — Sam Mendes

Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on. — Anne Lamott

And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window - remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up - and thinking: It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven? — John Rechy

For weeks Octavio returned to the shelter of the trees. The woman would appear as the sun reached midday. She would walk to the edge of the trees, find her chair and drag it to the boat pond. Every Sunday the same chair, the same spot. Every Sunday a book.
He needed only one word to imagine a hundred stories: she -
was a dancer; cooling her feet after a morning of twists and leaps.
was the daughter of a sea captain, remembering her childhood as the toy boats crossed the pond.
was an empress hiding among her subjects, shielding her face with a scarf made from the silk of ten thousand worms. Five thousand green, five thousand blue.
was a teacher, a lover of learning, patient and gentle with her students.
She - was a reader.
He had a library. — C.S. Richardson

They talk some more, Will prompting Peter into remembering their early childhood on the barge. How their parents always went that extra mile to make their infancy special, like the time they brought a freshly killed department store Santa Clause home for their midnight Christmas feast. — Matt Haig

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy? — Philip Roth

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. — Lewis Carroll

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

Or perhaps the truth was that there is
no Fate, no pattern, nothing at all except a tired man looking back and forgetting everything but this
and that detail which the very act of memory composes into a fate. Eschenburg, remembering his
childhood, wondered whether Fate was merely a form of forgetfulness. — Steven Millhauser

The sound of his voice was an overwhelming relief, like remembering the name of a beloved song or returning to a childhood haunt to find it totally unchanged. Did he not fee the same swell of relief? Or was he just better at hiding it? — Galt Niederhoffer