Childhood Language Quotes

As children we hoard and gloat over words. Words give ownership: we name our world and we claim it...Children trust the power of words.

When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.

I'm at the age when my friends have started having kids, and when my first good friend had a baby, the first time I picked up her daughter I spoke in French. I didn't even think about it. It just came out. Maybe it's because it's my mother tongue?

From one till seven, when we moved to England, I spoke only Portuguese. But I can't speak a word of it now.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.

Belgium is half French-speaking and half Flemish, and I was born on the French side. So we spoke it a lot - like, in kindergarten, it was almost all French. But then I moved to New Zealand when I was 10, where we obviously spoke English all the time, so I lost the French a little bit.

My mom speaks English - she moved to England in the '70s, so she's fluent in English. We use to speak in Spanish when I was a kid all the time, me and my mom. But when I went to boarding school, I kind of lost it a little bit.

I spoke Franglais growing up.