Jonathan Tropper Quotes

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

If - and it can be in a movie or in a department store - I hear someone arguing with their child, I break down and cry. Because it reflects how I was treated when I was little.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

I often meet adults in their 30s, 40s, or 50s who, as soon as they recognize me, suddenly become six years old again.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

As an adult, it's hard for me to remember my mother before her sickness. But if I go back into childhood, I can access that.

I think that we are all much closer to our childhood selves than we often think, so when we read about childhood, it can surprise us how immediate or moving it is, when perhaps those feelings are just there, waiting to be accessed all the time.

Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.

Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.

The children in 'Nobody Knows' had a resonance with me. The children are projections of myself.

I know I'm grown, but there's a part of me who will eternally be six years old.

Little things happen to us during the course of our lives when we were children that stay with us.

I remember when I was a kid I used to come home from Sunday School and my mother would get drunk and try to make pancakes

All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

We tend to think of orphans as being the protagonist of stories we read when we're kids, and yet here you are: you're an adult, you're supposed to manage, you're supposed to get over it, you're supposed to go on with your life, and you feel like a lost child.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

Being with a kid always takes you to being a kid somehow, and they really are showing me a childhood I might not have had in some way.

At 68 I'm every age I ever was. I always think of that. I'm not just 68. I'm also 55 and 21 and three. Oh especially three.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

I wasn't ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, "I'm so glad that's over. Nothing can ever be as bad again," without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.

What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline crack.

There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget.