“I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles -- tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant.... I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently -- it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable.” LanguageLearningChildhoodWordsPronunciation Book:Moon Tiger Source: Moon Tiger
“When I was a child they used to take us to this beach, and I would look and look at the sea, knowing that where I came from was somewhere out there. I saw it as an island. A small German island with my town, my house, my parents, exactly as I left it all." She stared across the table - dark intense eyes under a black fringe streaked with grey. " You don't have a map in your head as a child. Later, you have the globe - the seas and the shapes - and you can't ever get back to that emptiness, that mystery. Knowing that there are other places, but not knowing where they are, or how to get there.” Growing UpChildhood Book:City of the Mind Source: City of the Mind
“And so they ride through the city, father and child, seeing, each, a different place. Jane, with the liberation of childhood, without rationality or expectations, sees an anarchic landscape in which anything is possible and many things are provocative. She wrestles with language, scans advertisements, shop-signs, logos on vans and trucks. She pays professional attention to other children, in the way that animals are most sensitive to their own species. She searches out the things that tether her to a known world — a bus with a familiar destination, a hoarding that proclaims her favourite brand of chocolate, Volkswagen cars that are like her father’s. Hers is a heliocentric universe, and she is the sun. She is fettered by a child’s careless egotism, but freed from adult preconceptions. She does not know what to expect, and can therefore assess what she sees in its own terms. She does not interpret, and therefore can construct her own system of references. The Arabic script on the windows of the Bank of Kuwait becomes little dancing figures. The caryatids outside the church in Euston Road are ladies wearing bath towels with books on their heads. For her, the city is alternately mysterious and familiar, baffling and instructive. She tests her own capacities against the view from the window of the bus; she rhymes and puns, she counts, she classifies. She plays games with words and sounds, she flexes her imagination, she takes the place as she sees it and twists it to her own ends.” Growing UpChildhood Book:City of the Mind Source: City of the Mind
“Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.” ChildhoodMemoryAdulthoodChilldren Book:Moon Tiger Source: Moon Tiger
“Early reading is serendipitous, and rightly so. Gloriously so. Libraries favor serendipity, invite it; the roaming along a shelf, eyeing an unfamiliar name, taking this down, then that--oh, who's this? Never heard of her--give her a go? That is where, and how, you learn affinity and rejection. You find out what you like by exploring what you do not.” ReadingChanceChildhoodBooksLikesLibrariesSerendipityDislikes Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time Source: Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time