childhood

Nothing is more foreign than the world of one's childhood when one has truly left it.

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

Change is constant and always happening...The more flexible we are, the more we can benefit from life's changes that occurs.

You go through so many changes as a child, then you grow up and discover that none of that stuff mattered, except for the impression it made on your mind.

He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, somehow. But the PROCESS _ how he put together a story about the world__ workings _ that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She__ imagined he would stay transparent to her, more PART of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be opaque as a rock.

Awakening your spiritual self is like having a second childhood with faulty parents, broken bones and proverbial brussel sprouts.

My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn't bear to watch him leave with so much luggage.

He stared at the corner of the yellowed ceiling, at the spider web and its solitary occupant. __hy here?_ he asked the spider. __ou could choose anywhere instead of this house. I know I wouldn__ be here if I didn__ have to be._ The spider said nothing. Come to think of it, Callum was sure the spider hadn__ moved even an inch in the last week. Maybe it was dead. Dead and crisp like the untouched wasp carcass on his window sill.

When loneliness is a constant state of being, it harkens back to a childhood wherein neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life.

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.

She bent and placed a single daisy upon the grave. A simple white daisy. The plainest of flowers, perhaps the purest, Elspeth thought. It had cost next to nothing at all, and perhaps that was the point. She wasn__ being cheap. She was being symbolic. In her mind, Andrea deserved only the unstained purity of the simplest of daisies, a daisy that was unsoiled by a wealth that couldn__ find the money to have claimed her soul.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head.

O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from "Real Housewives" who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her.

I have been so very, very fortunate in my life. I've met or been in contact with several of my childhood heroes. I've interacted with people all over this planet, and even though I couldn't possibly hope to remember all their names, I remember a photograph, a poem, a sound, a joke, kind words of encouragement. All is not lost.

There are miracles and glory in every child. Our glory lies in empowering them to flourish their glory.

Childhood is this time of magic and monsters; hoping for one and fearing the other... The worst part of being a kid is discovering which one exists... So, I chose to believe in magic.

She said, "Daddy thinks that all the world's magic is almost evolved out."I thought of Roebuck Lake, its swamps and sloughs and loblollies and breaks of cypress and cane, its sunken treetops and stobs and bream beds and sleepy gar rolling over and over and over, its baptizing pools and bridges and mussels and mosquitoes and turkey vultures and, now in the drought, the gray flaking mud-flats and logs crowded with turtles and sometimes a fat snake yawning its tame old cottony mouth like a well-fed dog in a pen.I said, "Is that what the freak show is?"She said, "Dirty miracles.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.