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.

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

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...

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

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.

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

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.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in...

He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.

Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our...

When you're a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.

It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and...

For many of us, the curtain has just come down on childhood.

Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.

You see, here's my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.