EJ Johnson Quotes

As a little kid, I climbed a lot of trees because I always loved the bird's-eye view.

My mother did like to make clothes, and in I think the worst picture I've ever seen of myself - I must have been eight or nine - she'd dressed me in a matching t-shirt and Bermuda shorts ensemble which I think looked like somebody had thrown up all over it. I was so glad when that sewing machine stopped working, I have to say.

Childhood has its secrets and its mysteries; but who can tell or who can explain them!

In New York, everybody looks great and is well dressed, but seeing someone in Ohio wearing Marc Jacobs is like spotting an owl in Central Park. Rare.

I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder.

When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.

I grew up in a household without a TV. We lived next door to a library for a while, and at one point, I checked out all the books in the fairy tale section. I remember the librarian's quiet smile as I'd bring back one stack and exchange it for another.

I was interested in science or, at least, nature from an early age, learning the names of planets, cutting cartoons with facts about animals out of the newspaper and gluing them into a scrapbook, and, with a friend when I was five or six, trying to design a submarine.

I buy Dries van Noten shoes. I love his clothes, too.

There was a 'magic rock' my mom would lift up, and under the rock was a bunch of bugs. Roly-poly bugs and worms. Somehow I thought that it was a magical world of insects, and I wanted to go there. It was the same impulse as 'Pikmin' - I wanted to go into that world.

As a kid, I was mischievous, necessarily, but I always wanted to do adventurous stuff.

The world is so different for a child, waking in the mornings, wide-eyed and ready to take it all in.

Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.

I remember doing my mosaics or being in my little hiding place behind the couch snooping. I'd get bored sometimes, of course, but I think that's good for a kid, because it forces you to be creative.

I was perfectly satisfied with the West Side of Chicago when I was in knickerbockers. I hope it was with me.

When I was little, I was such a tomboy - I loved a baggy T-shirt and leggings.

When I was in school, I used to look out the window and see the big red double-deck buses driving by. It just looked so free.

When I was a kid, I liked books that just seemed so dense you could lose yourself in them for a whole afternoon. They were like their own whole world.

Even as a child, I had walked down streets reading novels, waiting for my feet to get stuck in tar as I crossed the road, like the absent-minded animal in a Richard Scarry kid's book.

When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.

My earliest memories are being in the lab, and the way the cement felt and the way it smelled, and the way the countertops looked and it just being this wonderful, warm, happy place where it was just full of toys.

When I was 15, I still liked climbing trees and hiding in cupboards.

One day I would want to be an Egyptologist, the next day an ornithologist. I was an exhausting child.

I believe in adventure and imagination, and I got that from my parents and the things I experienced as a child.

It's been a habit of mine since childhood to always be looking around. When I go shopping, I have more fun observing the town than shopping.