Formative Years Quotes

“Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“...you can love some all you want, but you can't go into their past and become a part of their formative years.”
― Caroline Kepnes, Hidden Bodies

“There are three qualities that make someone a true professional. These are the ability to work unsupervised, the ability to certify the completion of a job or task and, finally, the ability to behave with integrity at all times.”
― Subroto Bagchi

“There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so—crucial.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I have always wanted to kill you, all my life led to that blow. Jealousy and hatred compose my earliest memories. I have killed you every day in my thoughts.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“We all come by our stories and our interpretation of the world through the lives we’ve led and particularly through the earliest formative years of our development.”
― Pamela McLean, Self as Coach, Self as Leader: Developing the Best in You to Develop the Best in Others

“..so many of our most steadfast patterns are begun in those years between childhood and adulthood.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“I suppose the most important memory is of Mr. Electrico. On Labor Day weekend, 1932, when I was twelve years old, he came to my hometown with the Dill Brothers…. He was a performer sitting in an electric chair and a stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. I sat below, in the front row, and he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose and he cried, 'Live, forever!' And I thought, 'God, that’s wonderful. How do you do that?'...So when I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of 'Beautiful Ohio' and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks because I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. And so I went home and within days I started to write. And I’ve never stopped.”
― Ray Bradbury