"I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as-what I knew was that I worried a lot."

Childhood, Boredom, Worry, Emotion

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"I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as-what I knew was that I worried a lot."

Exlpore more Childhood quotes

"Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves."

Terry Pratchett, English Author

Childhood, Truth, Fear, Wisdom, Power

"For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe?"

Terry Pratchett, English Author

Childhood, Happiness, Inspirational, Future

"When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels."

Sylvia Plath, American Poet

Childhood, Experience, Courage, Mother

"For some reason, I kept seeing it-it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina-a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can."

Vladimir Nabokov, American Novelist

Childhood, Memory, Innocence, Vision

"While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights."

Orson Scott Card, American Writer

Childhood, Play, Secrets, Friendship

"I've always liked getting away with just a little bit of what you're not supposed to. Like my first book, Billy's Booger, got me in trouble with the principal's office."

William Joyce, American Author

Childhood, First, Office, Trouble

"A child's giggle is worth one hundred pounds of gold."

Amy Leigh Mercree, American Author

Childhood, Joy, Values, Happiness

"As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts."

Sherry Turkle, American Author

Childhood, Truth, Heart, Change

"Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead."

Richard Bach, American Novelist

Childhood, Wonder, Joy, Curiosity

"Babies do not want to hear about babies, they like to be told of giants and castles."

Samuel Johnson, English Author

Childhood, Baby, Imagination, Storytelling, Giants

Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."

Society

"The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness."

Society

"I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art."

Art

"It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell."

Depression

"You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain."

Empathy

"Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move."

Madness

"I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy."

Film

"And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. ... But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from."

Criticism

"Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it."

Struggle

"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."

Art