You see, when you're young and foolish it doesn't matter where you may be, you always think that you'll be happier somewhere else.

That’s the trouble with memories: everything seems much more fantastical with a childhood lens to filter out the limitations of reality.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

...for if we try to go on protecting them we prevent them from growing up to be ordinary, confident adults, capable of looking after themselves.

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times,And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.

My mother would say, 'Why are you always playing alone?' And I would say, 'I'm not playin', Ma. I'm fuckin' serious!

The increasingly thoughtful child can see the whole horribly upset world and would be understandably totally bewildered and deeply troubled by it

You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

For a child, it is in the simplicity of play that the complexity of life is sorted like puzzle pieces joined together to make sense of the world.

These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.

. . . it is true, even people with painful childhoods. . . grow up to be more interesting people. So, there's always a positive to a negative.

ми всі - родом з дитинства

Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.