Wounds Of Childhood Quotes

You grow up the day you realize your parents are just wounded children. ~ Srividya Srinivasan

Adulthood was invented to repair the wounds of childhood. ~ Joy Browne

I wanted to impress people because I was kind of a kid who was lost in the crowd - was sort of my, feeling about childhood was being part of a big family. ~ Laurie Anderson

Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin works, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans! ~ Harlan Ellison

Custom, law bent my first years to the religion of the happy Muslims. I see it too clearly: the care taken of our childhood forms our feelings, our habits, our belief. By the Ganges I would have been a slave of the false gods, a Christian in Paris, a Muslim here. ~ Voltaire

I'm nineteen tree rings and mashed acorns stop up my veins when I can't clot. Oh god, you beautiful person, I'll let you lick the salt off of my tattoos as if they were wounds, wounds made of ink and stories. ~ Taylor Rhodes

We cannot live without meaning, that would preclude any sense of identity, any hope, any future. ~ Carlina Rinaldi

We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life. ~ Michael Meade

Sisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other's chosen and most happy companions. In addition to their shared memories of childhood and of their relationship to each other's children, they share memories of the same home, the same homemaking style, and the same small prejudices about housekeeping that carry the echoes of their mother's voice ... ~ Margaret Mead

Excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis. Knowing our issues is not the same as healing our issues. In fact, knowing is often a willful act, entirely incongruent with the experience of surrender required to heal. I have known many people who could name their patterns and issues with great insight, but their actions didn't change a bit. The key to the transformation of challenging patterns and wounds is to heal them from the inside out. Not to analyze them, not to dissociate and dishonor them by calling them the 'pain body', not to watch them like an astronomer staring at a faraway planet through a telescope, but to jump right into the heart of them, encouraging their expression and release, stitching them into new possibilities with the thread of love. You want to transform your issues and patterns? Heal your heart. ~ Jeff Brown

Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century. ~ Anthony Marra

Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Because emotion systems coordinate learning, the broader the range of emotions that a child experiences the broader will be the emotional range of the self that develops. This is why childhood abuse is so devastating. If a significant proportion of the early emotional experiences one has are due to activation of the fear system rather than positive systems, then the characteristic personality that begins to build up from the parallel learning processes coordinated by the emotional state is one characterized by negativity and hopelessness rather than affection and optimism. ~ Joseph E. LeDoux

My father used to say that when he was growing up the water was clear and there were tons of fireflies everywhere ... He felt sorry for the kids growing up today ... But it is really beautiful ... Time will just keep on passing ... we'll get old ... and look back on the past. I hope we can always say ... how great things were. ~ Fuyumi Soryo

Summers end to soon just as childhood ends before we apprehend the effervescent of our youth. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I have no emotions. I just stand there, in the rubble of my life.
This ... this was my home. If it were a person, this would be a gaping chest wound, the kind no one can recover from. ~ Beth Revis

In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head. ~ Edvard Munch

N the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal. ~ Sarah Dessen

There is no greatness in dying for love, Raakha, she wanted to say. Those who die untimely, violent deaths don't become ashes. They become guilty scars on the flesh of the living. They become wounds that never heal no matter how much time passes. ~ Manjul Bajaj

The number of kids affected by obesity has tripled since 1980, and this can be traced in large part to lack of exercise and a healthy diet. ~ Virginia Foxx

There were the years - years of childhood and innocence - when I had believed that carminative meant - well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life - a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend. ~ Aldous Huxley

The Zen of Childhood
You can see it in the concentration
with which he empties his shoe,
that it hardly matters how long
a sneaker full of sand will turn
an eight year old's bedroom into a beach.
It only matters that he pours out all the sand,
and hides it from his mom.
For a child,
the doing is seamless with the becoming.
Wisdom is relearning
to see the world
with a child's eyes,
not missing a single grain. ~ Beryl Dov

I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do. ~ Dido Armstrong

Dissociation (being split-off from one's deepest truth) mimics enlightenment – but it isn't enlightenment. People who are dissociated live in great peace. But this is only because they have blocked their negative feelings. The enlightened person resolves his negatives feelings, and thus his peace is not false.

People who are dissociated do not suffer. But this is only because they have abandoned their healing process and numbed their pain. Enlightenment grows from the fertilized soil of suffering.

People who are dissociated call themselves enlightened. But this is only because they have they have no conception of what enlightenment is. Enlightenment is the polar opposite of dissociation.

People who are dissociated feel they have mastered forgiveness. But this is only because they completely deny the harm done to them – and the damage remaining. The enlightened forgive spontaneously and without effort because they have fully embraced their damaged parts and grieved every honest ounce of their misery. ~ Daniel Mackler

There are those who seem to feel they have no choice about being jerks in the present because they had a crappy childhood. Well, that's the definition of childhood; nobody gets out alive. You either get stronger from what you experience, or you turn it into a crutch, an excuse, a dodge. ~ J. Michael Straczynski

Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone. ~ Bell Hooks

No, I'm no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the
country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is
a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our
marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind
and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it
would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is
the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, percep-
tions, sounds, the human kind ... no geometry of landscape,
no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes
that we saw as the fi rst, and to which we gave ourselves wholly,
without reservation. ~ Eva Hoffman

I believe in miracles. At the age of 13, I was on holiday in Moscow with my mother. It was the only trip I took in my whole childhood. We stepped off a metro train and were approached by a talent scout who told me that she wanted to sign me to her modeling agency. ~ Olga Kurylenko

We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death ~ Alexander Herzen

He will never be satisfied," writes one biographer ... I know because I suffer from the same disease ... I don't believe for a minute that the flowers ever faded or the stars were ever dimmed in Rimbaud's eyes ... It was the world of men that his weary glance saw things pale and fade. He began by wanting to "see all, feel all, exhaust everything, explore everything, say everything." ... He had no choice of fighting for the rest of his life to hold the ground he had gained or to renounce the struggle utterly. Why could he not have compromised? Because compromise was not in his vocabulary. He was a fanatic from childhood, a person who had to go the whole hog or die. In this lied his purity, his innocence. ~ Henry Miller

I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there. ~ Michael Chabon

No one sets out to be the bad guy, you set out to change the world and heal the wounds of society. Until the day you realize just out deep those wounds go and that the only way to save the world is to put it down like a rapid dog. ~ Samuel Grace

It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess. ~ Harper Lee

Over every person's life, I have found, Satan masturbates and out from the dispersion of this black cloud, at some point follows a demon who waits to wound. ~ The Raveness

THERE WAS A BOY"

THERE was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander!--many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, 10
That they might answer him.--And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,--with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice 20
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
This boy was taken from his mates, and died
In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.
Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale
Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village-school; 30
An ~ William Wordsworth

Now his work-mates pitied him, although they tried not to show it, and it was generally arranged that he was given jobs which allowed him to work alone. The smell of ink, and the steady rhythm of the press, then induced in him a kind of peace - it was the peace he felt when he arrived early, at a time when he might be the only one to see the morning light as it filtered through the works or to hear the sound of his footsteps echoing through the old stone building. At such moments he was forgetful of himself and thus of others until he heard their voices, raised in argument or in greeting, and he would shrink into himself again. At other times he would stand slightly to one side and try to laugh at their jokes, but when they talked about sex he became uneasy and fell silent for it seemed to him to be a fearful thing. He still remembered how the girls in the schoolyard used to chant,

Kiss me, kiss me if you can
I will put you in my pan,
Kiss me, kiss me as you said
I will fry you till you're dead

And when he thought of sex, it was as of a process which could tear him limb from limb. He knew from his childhood reading that, if he ran into the forest, there would be a creature lying in wait for him. ~ Peter Ackroyd

The earth shook under their tread as their strong feet sank into the wet turf. A tiny haze and a sweet smell went up where they had crushed the grass and scattered the dew. Some were naked, some robed. But the naked ones did not seem less adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh. Some were geared but no no one in that company struck me as being of any particular age. One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless
heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man. Here it was all like that. ~ C.S. Lewis

Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community. ~ Parker J. Palmer

How come some stories have an ending when they never had a starting? ~ Neeraj Agnihotri

He had known since the age of nine that essentially he was alone and that he would always be alone, a conclusion more common to the forties.
Now, in his forties, he was seized by a fantasy life with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood. It took him a step beyond alone.
At a time when other men first see and fear their isolation, Dolarhyde's became understandable to him: he was alone because he was unique. With the fervor of conversion he saw that if he worked at it, if he followed the true urges he had kept down for so long, cultivated them as the inspirations they truly were, he could become. ~ Thomas Harris

I know that carrot is not the right word. I've
seen dragonflies and beetles, flying around, stuck together, one on the back of the other; I know it's
called mating. I know about ovipositors, for laying eggs, on leaves, on caterpillars, on the surface of the
water; they're right out on the page, clearly labeled, on the diagrams of insects my father corrects at
home. I know about queen ants, and about the female praying mantises eating the males. None of this is
much help. I think of Mr. and Mrs. Smeath, stark-naked, with Mr. Smeath stuck to the back of Mrs.
Smeath. Such an image, even without the addition of flight, will not do. ~ Margaret Atwood

I no longer missed the restless anticipation I'd experienced during my childhood and the surges of joy and sadness that came with it. I didn't feel troubled when the seasons changed. My heart beat the same in winter as it did in spring, because I knew what was around the corner. If I saw a group of students from my old high school walking home at the end of the day, I felt something close to pity for them: no one had told them yet how ordinary and predictable their lives were going to be. I had, in other words, accepted the measured composure of adulthood. ~ Mengestu Dinaw

Can a person who has been brought up in the heart of a thick dark forest, where one has to beat a path through multiple layers of trees just to take a letter to the post office, have any conception of what it's like to spend one's entire childhood waiting for a single tree to grow? ~ Audur Ava Olafsdottir

My childhood is full of pleasant moments and not so pleasant. Fortunately I have lucky to forget episodes of my life, most of them, bad. Which means that I have a selective memory. ~ Jasmina Alexander

...One cannot help but consider the future- what will it be like when all the wild places of the earth have been taken over by civilization, and there is no more room for Indians, Pirates, and Wild Boys? ~ Christopher Daniel Mechling