Cynthia Ozick Quotes

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.

There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.

Research in education has shown that we remember field trips long into adulthood. I remember visiting the post office in second grade and looking at the sorting machine. I have vivid memories of that, when I don't even remember the name of the teacher who took me.

If you think about stuff that happened when you were young, it stays with you forever.

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

My earliest memories are the best. I always try to remember the good times when Daddy was alive.

You never know when you're making a memory.

At night I dream about going to where I played when I was still young.

It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.

I think you never forget your childhood, whether it was happy or unhappy.

I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.

Learning of my father's passing at age 55 not only shattered the world, far from home, that had become my reality, but catapulted my childhood and relationship with family - which had felt like another lifetime - into the present.

The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again.

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.

The music of your youth stays with you throughout your life.

When you do something that people watch and enjoy as children, that's great because it stays with you, throughout your life. The things you loved as a child stay with you, and so do the people who were in those things.

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

When you smell our candles burning, what does it make you think of, my child?" Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts where the stone kings sit. I smell hot bread baking. I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf. I smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me. "I don't smell anything," she said.

Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.

Funny how certain things stay with you.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.

The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.