Childhood Perception Quotes

Children notice things first, people later.

One can tell a child everything, anything. I have often been struck by the fact that parents know their children so little. They should not conceal so much from them. How well even little children understand that their parents conceal things from them, because they consider them too young to understand! Children are capable of giving advice in the most important matters.

My father, to me, was 10 feet tall.

I couldn't believe I was working with Michael Jackson. I thought, growing up as a kid, I thought Michael was a cartoon.

When I was six, God was a white man with a big beard riding on a white cloud. That's the image television pumps.

I was raised in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school, and my childhood brain perceived medieval Catholicism as an action movie: There's this crazy omnipresent guy who can destroy you at any moment.

When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.

Once you learn the idea of what a good guy is, you want your dad to be a good guy, and when your dad lets you down and doesn't act like a good guy, it's disappointing and can make you angry as you see it happen, which is beautiful and very believable.

To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme.

I originally thought I'd grow up to be a woman. I didn't question that when I was little.

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that human beings wrote books. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance for me... I just didn't think it was something that people did.

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.

Too bad, whenever adults tell kids to enjoy their childhoods, kids are like, 'You don't understand anything,' and everyone is right.

When I was a kid, a policeman was someone you looked up to and respected.

It's such a potent thing, to be a kid. We grow up, and we don't want to remember how everything is so beautiful and terrifying when we're young. The older you get, the more you hope to muffle things.

I thought everybody could sing, because everybody in my family could.

My nieces and my nephews think the only thing that I do is 'Ice Age.' That's fine with me because pretty soon they'll grow up enough to realize that I suck or that my time has passed, whichever it might be.

I think loads of people see acting, when they're kids, as these magical stories that just happen within the context of the film or the play or the cartoon or whatever they're seeing. They don't imagine that there are actually people that go and do that for a living.

When I was a child, I'd see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it.

I grew up during the shift to socialism, and since it was my childhood, I used to think that everything was beautiful and human.

I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.

For much of my life - my sister and I have talked about this - when we moved, we just thought the world behind us disappeared, and all of the people, they just didn't exist any more.

Anyone who meets you and doesn't want to get to know you and be part of your life is stupid. I saw it when I was just a kid." "No. You thought I was a vampire and you wanted to be my friend so I wouldn't eat you." "Well, that too. But I found out soon enough you weren't a blood sucker and I still licked you.