I started training judo when I was 5 years old. I didn't know much. My mom just took me and my brother to do some judo because we were very energetic. We did that for a couple of years. I don't know...

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I...

Ah, my dad's whistle. On holidays when I was a kid, we would all be off in the rock pools along the beach. When it came time to go, we'd hear the whistle and we'd all come running. Like dogs!

I knew that I had it tough compared to children around me. But I felt like I needed it. I think I had the wisdom as a child to know that it would help me later on.

My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing - communication devices. I grew up between my father's laboratory and my...

I like working on stories where I can explore the darker corners of childhood without illustrations but with humor.

He was, out of all sight {as I remember him}, the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window.

The older I get the more I enjoy my childhood…! ~James A. Murphy

My whole life, you have made decisions for me. "Your whole life," Georgiana pointed out, "totals nine years."

I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact...

Elsa's joke Where do baby apes sleep? In apricots!

You could get crickets to pop out of a book as a little, little girl, but now you have to relearn it? Well, children can do so many things until they're told they can't.

Children need the lie to be brave enough to sleep in their beds

There's the parent you want and the parent you have.

A happy childhood can fortify one against the ravages of life, and part of that happiness is found in books, which become our constant companions for the rest of our lives.

It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.

It's a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, Momma, do we believe in winter?

The boy heaved a sigh. I would ask to go with you, he said, but I have to finish my lessons. I so look forward to the day when I know everything. Then I won't have to read any more books or do any...

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

I remember my own childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them.

When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of. It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.

Yes, I regret you because you are a true child, Scarlett. A child who cries because she can't touch the moon. And what would she do with it if she finally reached it?

Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation.

It takes so little to make a child happy that it is a pity, in a world so full of sunshine and pleasant things, that there should be any wistful faces, empty hands, or lonely little hearts.

I was a structuralist at the age of seven, which is about the right age for it.

In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with...

Tiddlywinks, tiddlywinks, I want to play tiddlywinks, chanted Ramona, shaking her head back and forth.

Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she'd be out on the...

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her...

Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me.