WHAT CHILDREN SENSE

'Unconsciously, everyone under the age of ten knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocriosy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty.'

Mavis Gallant, 'The Doctor' in The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories, p.173.

WHAT A CHILDHOOD OF SUFFERING GIVES YOU

'For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it - could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever can came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank, or on some day of great coasting clouds looked across acres of flax in bloom? Why, short of exile, would anyone ever submit to the vast geometry of sky and earth, to the glare and heat, to the withering winds? But how else could he have met the mystery of nights when the stars were scoured clean and the prairie was full of breathings from a long way off, and the strange, friendly barking of night-hunting owls?'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.281.

THE POWER OF PLACE

'Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.21.

HOW EACH STAGE MAKES THE WHOLE

'I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child I am always a child. Because I was one a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. Because I was once a rebellious student, there is and always will be in me the student crying out for reform.

This does to mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any these ages, the perpetual student, the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide: my past is part of what makes the present Madeleine and must not be denied or rejected or forgotten.'

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.200.

WHAT EXPERIENCE DO WRITERS NEED?

'We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.84. 

DEATH CANNOT HOLD THEM

'How they do live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond  doubt that they still live in us.' 

Frederick Buechner, A Sacred Journey, p.21. 

READING AS A CHILD

'I suppose it is partly because you read so much more slowly as a child that the books you come to then seem as endless as summer and richer, fuller, more inexhaustible than anything you are likely to read later on.'

Frederick Buechner, A Sacred Journey, p.15.

CHILDHOOD & CREATION

'We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it...Our delight in the sunshine on the deep bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and grass in the far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.' 

George Eliot, Mill of the Floss, p.45.  

"THEY'RE NO TROUBLE!"

'The potential downside to never having anything to do with trouble in your family is the possibility that your family never suspects that trouble ever has anything to do with you.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.116.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LOVE & READING

'And when it comes to colossal strokes of good fortune...it starts here - it starts with having a family who loves you and someone who inspires you to read. Not because reading makes you smart, but because to involve yourself in a story is to imagine what it's like to be someone else.' 

Robert Webb, How Not to be a Boy, p.67. 

TRUE FAITH

'As far back as I can remember, I had the habit of thanking God for everything I received, and asking him for everything I wanted. If I lost a book, or any of my playthings, I prayed that I might find it. I prayed walking along the streets, in school and out of school, whether playing or studying. I did this not in obedience to any prescribed rule. It seemed natural. I thought of God as an everywhere-present Being, full of kindness and love, who would not be offended if children talked to him.' 

Charles Hodge in Dale Ralph Davis, Slogging Along in the Paths of Righteousness: Psalms 13-24, p. 62. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF PARENTS

'At some level every kid knows that his parents' wellbeing is paramount to his own safety, even his sense of self.' 

Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain, p.43. 

THE EMOTIONAL LITERACY OF CHILDREN

'How quick children are to absorb the unexpressed anxieties of their parents; how fluent they become in the unconscious art of compensation, and how instinctive is their assumption of responsibility.' 

Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain: Notes from an Australian Life, p.40. 

WHEN A FATHER CRIES

'It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another's tears are more unbearable than one's own.'

Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, p.113.

TIME

'Here's how time works. When you're young, your mind is running really fast, like a camera over-cranked to produce a slow-motion film, so the days and weeks and summers seem incredibly long. When you grow old, the mind slows down, doesn't clock so much sensory stimuli, so the days and years flash by. The same of things happens in a day. Morning time seems longer because your mind is whirring. Evening times goes by faster, because you've slowed down - unless you're being stimulated by lively company at dinner.'

Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, p.259.

THE POWER OF PLACE

'All of us, I believe, carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we experienced such intensity of life there: places where, like the child that "feels its life in every limb" in Wordsworth's poem 'We are Seven,' our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened. By way of returning the compliment, we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far way from them.' 

Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, p.242. 

CHILDHOOD GRIEF

'Holiday and school became the same.'
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, p.14. 

CHILDHOOD GRIEF

'....every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief...'
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, p.9. 

CHILDHOOD

'At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done.'

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, p.76.

THE PASSAGE OF TIME

‘…a boy’s mind is different from an old man’s by precisely a lifetime.’
Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, p.71.