Childhood Memories Quotes

“My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags. And while those bags might hold a few hazy recollections—a diner with a jukebox at the table, being pushed on a swing set, the way it felt to be picked up and spun around—it didn’t seem enough to last a whole lifetime.”
― Jennifer E. Smith, This Is What Happy Looks Like

“Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”
― Julian Barnes, England, England

“Now I gazed out of my office window. Slowly the world was changing from old-gold to the deep purple which, in the words of that dreamy song Mum was fond of humming, bathes garden walls under the twinkle of starlight.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows: A novel

“...my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room ... I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Don't you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“As I reached the door, the constable said, “Good luck in Canada, son.” For a second I expected his voice to morph into Uncle Sid’s as he urged me to give his love to Rose Marie and the Mounties.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows: A novel

“Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“...some nights I'd sneak out and listen to the radio in my Dad's old Chevy - children need solitude - they don't teach that in school...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Sam had never heard of a bear on a boat, but here she sat, on a boat with a bear. ”
― Douglas Weissman, Life Between Seconds

“Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended.”
― Floyd C. Forsberg, The Toughest Prison of All

“Gdje su zlatne ptice ljudskih snova, preko kojih se to bezbrojnih mora i vrletnih planina do njih dolazi? Da li nam se ta duboka čežnja djetinje nerazumnosti posigurno javlja samo kao tužni znak izvezen na mahramama i na safijanskim koricama nepotrebnih knjiga?”
― Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish

“By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.”
― d.k. LeVick, Bridges: A Tale of Niagara

“In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“Since my earliest memory, I imagined I would be a chef one day. When other kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons or music videos on YouTube, I was watching Iron Chef,The Great British Baking Show, and old Anthony Bourdain shows and taking notes. Like, actual notes in the Notes app on my phone. I have long lists of ideas for recipes that I can modify or make my own. This self-appointed class is the only one I've ever studied well for.
I started playing around with the staples of the house: rice, beans, plantains, and chicken. But 'Buela let me expand to the different things I saw on TV. Soufflés, shepherd's pie, gizzards. When other kids were saving up their lunch money to buy the latest Jordans, I was saving up mine so I could buy the best ingredients. Fish we'd never heard of that I had to get from a special market down by Penn's Landing. Sausages that I watched Italian abuelitas in South Philly make by hand. I even saved up a whole month's worth of allowance when I was in seventh grade so I could make 'Buela a special birthday dinner of filet mignon.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High

“He remembers when he was a kid, freckly and unafraid, when the world seemed like it was blissfully endless but everything still made perfect sense.”
― Casey McQuiston

“Externals have a great effect on the young. I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Experience has taught me that our childhoods leave in us stories like this – stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“Echoes of life call to me,
like sparks of hope in the darkness.
Times of play and freedom ...

The trees we would climb,
higher and higher towards the sky,
releasing our dreams towards the heavens.”
― Susan L. Marshall, All the Hope We Carry

“The instructions read, ‘Dump the monkeys onto the table. Pick up one monkey by the arm. Hook another arm through a second monkey’s arm. Continue making a chain. Your turn is over when you drop a monkey.’ Most of my childhood life at the house on Arce Subdivision had been like that, constantly linking monkeys together and anticipating something going wrong.”
― Bong Serrano, Batangas: My Sky and Earth

“We hold the places of our youth unchanged in our minds and stay secretly young that way.”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return & Revolution

“She wondered how her girlhood home had fared. Did the walls (a combination of mud and plywood) still smell like life? Did vivid leaves still shimmer through the windows (little more than pane-less holes) like hope? Did rain still tap-dance on the roof (a rusty sheet of corrugated metal) like joy?”
― Marc Arginteanu

“For though I don't believe
in ghosts, I am haunted
by lilacs.
[excerpted from 'Lilacs']”
― Linda Pastan, Traveling Light

“As I reached the door, the constable said, “Good luck in Canada, son.”  For a second I expected his voice to morph into Uncle Sid’s as he urged me to give his love to Rose Marie and the Mounties.”
― Michael W. Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows: A novel

“Now I gazed out of my office window.  Slowly the world was changing from old-gold to the deep purple which, in the words of that dreamy song Mum was fond of humming, bathes garden walls under the twinkle of starlight.”
― Michael W. Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows: A novel

“Can you ever get childhood levels of happiness back? Could we ever be happy as we were here as kids?”
― Sophie Kinsella, The Burnout

“You cannot go back and live your childhood all over again. But don’t forget that there is a child within you, an exceptional child. Cherish and pamper this child. Never, never hurt your inner child.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“My siblings might be too young to remember her, but I’d known two Mommas. The first Momma had been an idealist who organized our home and planned for birthdays, holidays, and school projects. The second Momma had emerged slowly out of the turmoil of constant moving and living without running water and electricity. The latter Momma had conceded her idealism by making do with what we had. While I barely knew the first Momma, I'd seen just enough of her to miss her.”
― Cherilyn Christen Clough, Chasing Eden A Memoir

“To understand parent-child conflict, adults need to revisit their own childhood memories...when you figure out something about your own childhood, it serves a double purpose: when you can acknowledge your unmet needs, you can appreciate that your child may have similar unmet needs.”
― Janis Clark Johnston, It Takes a Child to Raise a Parent: Stories of Evolving Child and Parent Development

“The boy in me still carries the memories of those days when I lifted crab pots out of the Colleton River before dawn, when I was shaped by life on the river, part child, part sacristan of tides.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides