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Quote by Peter Härtling

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Reden und Essays zur Kinderliteratur

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Peter Härtling

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“The amount of time that elapsed between my two-year-old self toddling along the National Mall waving a flag and my eighteen-year-old self moving into a dorm feels vast to me, but I know now how time moves when you're grown-up, and I know those years must have gone much faster for my parents than for me. To my dad, hardly any time at all passed between when the siren called him into the bunker and when he started packing boxes full of shelf-stable food to send to his baby at college.”

ChildhoodParenting
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“He decided to take the C downtown and fumbled through blizzardy wind to Central Park West. Once there, he stepped inside the park. The wind dropped magically away. In the stillness, Gregory noticed that every twig and branch held a delicate stack of snow. Snow swarmed like honeybees in the golden glow of the old-fashioned streetlamps; it slathered tree trunks and sparkled like crushed diamonds at his feet. He heard a whispering noise and saw two people glide from among the trees on cross-country skis. A lavender lunar radiance filled the park. It was a world from childhood: castles and forests and magic lamps and princes scaling walls of brambles.”

ChildhoodSnowStillnessCentral ParkDiamondsHoneybees
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“All this was in contrast to the idea that a newborn, on the basis of cortical immaturity, is a being who remembers and understands nothing: a person only within the context of the mother’s acknowledgment, blank, a species of human cabbage.”

ChildhoodBabyMotherhoodMeaningInfantInfancyNewbornMaternal LoveMaternal Influence
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“Come spring, the trees give us gifts. Green bits that helicopter down from above. When they land, Joey and I follow, retrieve them and bend the blades until they touch, releasing the glue inside so we can stick them onto our noses and call each other Pinocchio. This beats anything in my yard. Gathering buds that die and fall was fine once. But chasing helicopters and having a green nose is better.”

HappinessChildhoodSpring
Book:American Girl: Memories That Made Me
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“As children, we tolerate working conditions that we'd find intolerable as adults: the constant exposure of our attainment to a hostile audience; the motivation by threat instead of encouragement (and big threats, too: if you don't do this, you'll ruin your whole future life . . .); the social world in which you're mocked and teased, your most embarrassing desires exposed, your new-formed body held up for the kind of scrutiny that would destroy an adult. Often, during childhood, this comes with physical threats, too—being pushed and shoved on the playground, punched and kicked. The eternal menace that something more savage is waiting around the corner on your way home. Imagine how that would feel to you as an adult: that perpetual threat to your bodily integrity and your mental wellbeing. We would never stand for it, but we did as children because it was expected of us and we didn't know any better.”

ChildhoodConfidenceTraumaSelf WorthBullyingSelf Advocacy
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