Haruki Murakami Quotes

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

People who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but who also therefore had to solve their own problems alone. These people, who give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. In their presence one feels one cannot be recognized as a person with problems just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom he always had to be strong.

It is precisely because a child's feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.

People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.

To live is to have worries and uncertainties. Keep them inside, and they will destroy you for certain--leaving behind a person so callused that emotion can find no root in his heart.

The Lourie Center is an important model to consider...(in) mental health care... It is imperative that we use this knowledge to help ensure that every young child in our society has the opportunity to get an emotionally healthy start in life.

I understood more what Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan, what they were coming from. Kind of the horrors of their childhoods that they were coming from. When you experience such pain early on, some people really interface with that pain and try and unpack it, and some people just take it and squelch it down and try and be as successful as they can. And, you know, encourage everybody, "Don't dwell on the negative! Come on, buck up!"

If parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable.

It's very advantageous to be sensitive with your work - and, yet, being sensitive, in reality, when criticized, it can annihilate you. It can destroy you. And with the internet there sometimes is a lot of harm, which I find must be very difficult for youngsters coming on - it can be very harsh; the criticism. And, sometimes, it can be a little cruel - which makes it hard for young performers coming on.

A child's mental health is just as important as their physical health.

Men take their misfortunes to heart and keep them there.

When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.

Look into the heart of each child. That child might be suffering and eventually they'll be an adult, but help them get to that next plane because they have something to offer.

I don't know if child actors are necessarily more screwed up than most people.

Happy children should not try to be artists. You have to be born with a broken heart and a sense of loneliness inside. I never had a happy moment as a child myself.

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.

I have a big hole in my heart," I said. "But it'll close over." I don't want to sound all Dr. Phil," she said. "But don't let the scab seal the pain in, okay?" That's good advice," I said. "I hope I can manage it.

Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.

Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.

So you grow up with those messages, "You're a failure, you embarrass me, that's why I dress you in dark colors etc." or even when parents commit suicide, the child may think they were a failure as a child causing that. The majority of those people who weren't loved turn to drugs and alcohol and suicide.