During this week, after the Christmas rush and before the silliness of New Year's Eve, we often pause to assess our path, our choices. Some of us make resolutions - you know, lose weight, relax more, spend more time socializing - and often these promises to self evaporate into good intentions, not kept.  

Instead, enjoy the wisdom about your earlier years - childhood years between toddlerhood and teen land. What truths define that time in your life?  

Gregory Cowles, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, has compiled a list of favorite quotations about middle childhood ranging from television shows like “The Little Rascals” to popular children’s books by Judy Blume and others.

  Readers have added some favorites:

 There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
"I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong."
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
What's right for you--just listen to
The voice that speaks inside.”
― Shel Silverstein 

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder. Flowers once the size of pine trees return to clay pots. Even terror diminishes. The giants and giantesses of the nursery shrink to crabby teachers and human fathers.

- Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game

 How do you describe those wonder years of childhood?

(S-R archives photo)

 

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