Itzhak Perlman Quotes

Childhood - that was not my favorite time in my life.

I was not very strong growing up, and my uncle used to look at me, like, 'This kid is not growing up, he is growing tall but he can be broken like a banana.' The banana in Congo is called 'Dikembe.' So my uncle start calling me, 'Dikembe, Dikembe, look at you Dikembe, you cannot even stand up.' It took a long time for me to walk.

My mom gives me an allowance. She keeps me pretty tight-reined.

The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

I mean, being a child was being a child, was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child.

I was 2 when my parents - actress Connie Stevens and singer Eddie Fisher - divorced. I was too young to experience the pain of their split, but it was rough growing up with a father who wasn't there.

My mom was my mother and father. My father lost his mind when I was about 4 years old. And my mom did everything she could to make sure that we was brought up right.

It's one thing to get a letter from your kid at camp telling you he wants to come home. It's another to get a letter from a grown child saying they're coming back to live with you!

When my father died, I was nine or 10, and my mother was like a dad and a mom to me. She raised me and supported me when I came to the U.S.

When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.

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.

The only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem. He's a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father. So, you know that's what I enjoy about it. It's harder to listen to than ever before because I have a bunch of kids and you just can't put it on.

We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

My parents told me they were going to kill me at least a thousand times growing up. "I'm gonna kill you," and then they'd whack me on the side of the head or whatever. And "What's wrong with you?" And "I'm gonna lock you up," and "I'm gonna throw you out the window," and "I'm gonna kill you." You know, all these things that you say in the heat of a normal chaotic household.

Right from the start my parents had left me to fend for myself. Apparently unaware that I was a kid, they invariably treated me like an adult, perhaps because they themselves were no spring chickens.

When you're hurt very badly in your childhood, the area that it has the greatest effect on is relationships. Once you feel like you can't trust people, once you feel like that they don't care about you, that they're really not going to take care of you, it gets very difficult in relationships.

I'm not saying that all women are blameless - all women are not. There are women with despicable characters who are cruel and terrible and some of them are mothers. But why do we blame our mothers more than our fathers? We let our fathers get away scot-free. We hardly even knew who they were in many cases, given the way this culture raises kids, and they may have been quite cruel. They may even have raped us as children, but even if they raped us, we will blame our mothers for not protecting us instead of blaming our fathers who actually did it.

Although some people will say it's a cliché, I think not having had a father when I was growing up affect me negatively because I didn't have a good role model to follow.

Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.

The Little Boy and the Old Man Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon." Said the old man, "I do that too." The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants." I do that too," laughed the little old man. Said the little boy, "I often cry." The old man nodded, "So do I." But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems Grown-ups don't pay attention to me." And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand. I know what you mean," said the little old man.

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.