Early Life Experiences Quotes

My mother died of cystic fibrosis before I knew her. I was two years old, and I don't remember her. I do remember, though, when it was just my father and me, before he met the woman who would become the mother who raised me, before my younger sister, Gillian. It was just the two of us, and he was my whole world.

Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.

Boxing was just another one to keep me going as a child.

I suppose it is a gift, being young, but it isn't special. We've all got it, early in life.

Even during my father's 1984 gubernatorial campaign, it was, 'Do you want to grow up and be governor one day?' 'No. I am four.'

CHILDHOOD: The rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.

Before 'Music and Lyrics,' I was just doing high school plays and singing in my church choir and my school choir.

I didn't have a computer until I was 19 - but I did have an abacus.

That earliest shock in one's life which occurs to all of us; which first makes us think.

I don't know if I came to this life with it or if it's something that came to me in my childhood, but I do feel that some of the things my parents said to me and how they raised me really stuck with me.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

My father has taught me all the tricks of the boys at an early age, which has made me very careful.

I grew up in Shanghai 'til I was 10 or 11, with one year in Tibet. When I was 5 or 6 years old, the American radio station came to Shanghai, and I used to love bebop and jazz, but I didn't know where it came from.

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.

Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.

When I was a kid, I was roaming through Glastonbury Festival at eight years old, on my own. I say 'on my own', but I was probably with my oldest sister Sarah, and she would have been 13 or 14 at the time, so she'd have been walking us around. But I got to go places and meet people, and was trusted a lot, without a doubt.

Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

Feelings about money -- saving and spending, holding back and letting go -- start very early in our lives. Stingy people have often been forced to give when they were very, very young, when they weren't ready. And generous people have often been really appreciated when they were very young.

When I search myself carefully I do think it's from my mother. I even feel strange saying that. Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things. But certainly influences early on that I felt from my mother. I wouldn't say she was "political" per se; she was sensitive to other people.

I don't remember my childhood very well for one reason or another, possibly childhood trauma or possibly just a very bad memory. My early life has sort of been erased from my memory banks.

One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce.

I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.

Where I came from in the country, there was no place to hear pop music like Little Richard and people like that. Later, I heard James Brown, Otis Redding, The Drifters, The Four Aces, The Ink Spots.

When you're little, every experience writes on the canvas of who you are.

Since babyhood, I've always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church causes.