I wanted to be a surgeon, possibly influenced by the qualities of our family doctor who cared for our childhood ailments.
I knew all of the childhood prayers I uttered on my knees at the side of my bed. Many years of Sunday-school attendance had etched certain Psalms and rote prayers into the fibers of my brain. However, somewhere deep inside of me, I had the secret belief that I did not know how to pray, and that frightened me.
As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.
My childhood was defined by my father's absence. His presence looms so large. Up until the age of 18, he was a superstar for me.
Books were a huge part of my childhood growing up. We would go on vacation, and my mom was always carting manuscripts around.
It's something that is very comforting. Just the process of them moving throughout their stages of early childhood. Learning to walk, learning to talk. Reaching out for you for the first hug, telling you they love you.
My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened.
I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.
I have nothing to say about my childhood. It was a perfectly pleasant upbringing - it's not like it was unhappy or anything.
Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.
I do not have a family, per se. When I was younger, I grew up in foster care with my brother and sister. It was really a struggle, and knowing that there were people out there with tight-knit families really made my childhood an unfortunate one.
Ryan Reynolds was my childhood crush. His name is all over the walls of my room. I actually Photoshopped myself into a picture with him my freshman year of high school.
I was on the beach every summer. That was the pleasant part of my childhood because we were right by the sea. We'd take a picnic, and I'd spend hours in the water until I turned blue. You couldn't get me out of there.
To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.
To me, you know, from my childhood I always had a fascination for United States.
Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies, and I had played a little at school and at camp. My parents would drag me out to perform for my family, like all parents do, but it was a hobby - nothing more.
The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.
It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected.
That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.
It was a fairly happy childhood. My father was working away, and my mum brought up five kids all on her own.
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.
When you hear the words 'magic' and 'story', they will probably evoke thoughts of your favourite fairy tales from childhood. Storybook pages abound with all manner of magic: fantastical fairies, wish-granting genies, or even a certain boy wizard.
Anybody who says, 'My childhood was completely happy,' is a person who isn't remembering the truth.
When I was a child, my father would read out loud to my brother, my mother, and me. Several times in the course of my childhood, he would read 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' over a few weeks. They were a great favorite with all of us.
Our parents deserve our honor and respect for giving us life itself. Beyond this they almost always made countless sacrifices as they cared for and nurtured us through our infancy and childhood, provided us with the necessities of life, and nursed us through physical illnesses and the emotional stresses of growing up.
I think we all miss our childhood.
Students who have spent their childhood here in Florida deserve to qualify for the same in-state tuition rate at universities their peers and classmates do.
My work in general involves getting over my fears that are deeply embedded since childhood: Fear of darkness, fear of dangerous activities in general, and fear of dirt - I had a considerable obsessive compulsive disorder as a child.
Growing up with the childhood that I had, I learned to never let a man make me feel helpless, and it also embedded a deep need in me to always stick up for women.
I've always reverted to a sense of childhood, just in everyday life.
I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.
I have 9 children; I'm a big believer in childhood education, but we've got to be smart about getting a good return on the investment of those dollars.
I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos, I'm in fancy dress, playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.
My experience in childhood and adolescence of the subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by men had convinced me that I was not cut out to be a wife.
I actually support President Obama's initiatives on early childhood. He has appointed me as a commissioner to consult his administration on educational excellence for Hispanics in the U.S. We try to find ways to improve the education system for Hispanics in America, to achieve excellence.
