Ticket To Childhood Quotes

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend. That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.

But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body. I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.

But he could not help it. No one can help it. One is a realist. One has put up with it all ever since childhood; one has had the courage to look it full in the eye, possibly courage enough to look it in the eye all one's life long. Then one day the distances beckon with their floating possibilities, and in one's hands are the admission tickets, two slips of blue paper. One is a realist no longer. One has finished putting up with it all, one no longer has the courage to look it in the eye, one is in the power of beckoning hospitable distances, floating possibilities, perhaps forever afterwards. Perhaps one's life is over.

Books by Roald Dahl The BFG Boy: Tales of Childhood Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator Danny the Champion of the World Dirty Beasts The Enormous Crocodile Esio Trot Fantastic Mr. Fox George’s Marvelous Medicine The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me Going Solo James and the Giant Peach The Magic Finger Matilda The Minpins The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes Skin and Other Stories The Twits The Umbrella Man and Other Stories The Vicar of Nibbleswicke The Witches The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

I of course was told for most of my childhood by multiple sources that to be gay was a one-way ticket to hell. Homosexuality and suicide were the “unforgivables,” and I believed this wholeheartedly. Thank God for books and libraries…and school.

As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe... I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry, or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.

I run to the water's edge and the cold ocean licks my toes. Without touching my face I can feel that it's wet with fog and tears and sweat. I stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.

Then Deborah stood at the wicket gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets. "Pass through," she said when Deborah reached her. "We saw you coming." The wicket gate became a turnstile. Deborah pushed against it and there was no resistance, she was through. "What is it?" she asked. "Am I really here at last? Is this the bottom of the pool?" "It could be," smiled the woman. "There are so many ways. You just happened to choose this one." Other people were pressing to come through. They had no faces, they were only shadows. Deborah stood aside to let them by, and in a moment they had gone, all phantoms. "Why only now, tonight?" asked Deborah. "Why not in the afternoon, when I came to the pool?" "It's a trick," said the woman. "You seize on the moment in time. We were here this afternoon. We're always here. Our life goes on around you, but nobody knows it. The trick's easier by night, that's all." "Am I dreaming, then?" asked Deborah. "No," said the woman, "this isn't a dream. And it isn't death, either. It's the secret world." The secret world... It was something Deborah had always known, and now the pattern was complete. The memory of it, and the relief, were so tremendous that something seemed to burst inside her heart. "Of course..." she said, "of course..." and everything that had ever been fell into place. There was no disharmony. The joy was indescribable, and the surge of feeling, like wings about her in the air, lifted her away from the turnstile and the woman, and she had all knowledge. That was it - the invasion of knowledge. ("The Pool")

You saved me, you should remember me. The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms. When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling. I remember sounds like that from my childhood, laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, something like that. Lugano. Tables under the apple trees. Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags. And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water; perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him. Crucial sounds or gestures like a track laid down before the larger themes and then unused, buried. Islands in the distance. My mother holding out a plate of little cakes— as far as I remember, changed in no detail, the moment vivid, intact, having never been exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age hungry for life, utterly confident— By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green pieced into the dark existing ground. Surely spring has been returned to me, this time not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

The pristine vision of childhood restores freshness to even the most time-worn scenes, and in Laura’s company I recovered some of the delights I had experienced years ago when my son was a little boy.

Maggie nodded. She was more than okay. Not only was she no longer sick, she felt as if she'd just awoken from the long, safe torpor of her childhood. The night had blasted her free of that shell, and she had emerged new and raw and ready. She felt the ticket stub folded carefully in her pocket. How many kids in Bray would be able to say they'd stood just feet from Billy Corgan, that they'd been at the Metro for the "Siamese Dream" record release show, that they'd seen Lake Shore Drive on a Sunday morning through the prism of a concert comedown, the runners looking so silly with their skinny legs and their neon shorts, chugging along the footpath with their calorie counters and Gatorade?

Ideological agendas in public schools absorb time, energy and resources that are especially needed in the education of young people from a cultural background often lacking in many of the things that youngsters in more fortunate circumstances can take for granted— such as highly educated parents, books in the home and a whole way of life that prepares them in childhood for achievements as adults. Propagandists in the classroom are a luxury that the poor can afford leas of all. While a mastery of mathematics and English can be a ticket out of poverty, a highly cultivated sense of grievance and resentment is not.

PROCRASTINATION The day after tomorrow, yes, only the day after tomorrow ... Tomorrow I’ll start thinking about the day after tomorrow, Maybe I could do it then; but not today ... No, nothing today; today I can’t. The confused persistence of my objective subjectivity, The sleep of my real life, intercalated, Anticipated, infinite weariness— I’m worlds too weary to catch a trolley— That kind of soul ... Only the day after tomorrow ... Today I want to prepare, I want to prepare myself for tomorrow, when I’ll think about the next day ... That’d be decisive. I’ve already got the plans sketched out, but no, today I’m not making any plans ... Tomorrow’s the day for plans. Tomorrow I’ll sit down at my desk to conquer the world; But I’ll only conquer the world the day after tomorrow ... I feel like crying, I suddenly feel like crying a lot, inside ... That’s all you’re getting today, it’s a secret, I’m not talking. Only the day after tomorrow ... When I was a kid the Sunday circus diverted me every week. Today all that diverts me is the Sunday circus from all the weeks of my childhood ... The day after tomorrow I’ll be someone else, My life will triumph, All my real qualities—intelligent, well-read, practical— Will be gathered together in a public notice ... But the public notice will go up tomorrow ... Today I want to sleep, I’ll make a fair copy tomorrow ... For today, what show will repeat my childhood to me? Even if I buy tickets tomorrow, The show would still really be the day after tomorrow ... Not before ... The day after tomorrow I’ll have the public pose I will have practiced tomorrow. The day after tomorrow I’ll finally be what I could never be today. Only the day after tomorrow ... I’m sleepy as a stray dog's chill. I’m really sleepy. Tomorrow I’ll tell you everything, or the day after tomorrow ... Yes, maybe only the day after tomorrow ... By and by ... Yes, the old by and by ...

The man standing in the booth placing the tickets into her hands for the fun-house loomed largely in front of her with arms comprised of iron muscle. She remembered the gray cataract that covered over one of his eyes and the terrified feeling it gave her. She had been too young to understand the malady. To her; his eye looked as though it belonged to a creature from the sea. A frightening creature composed of reptilian and fish like attributes, which would pull unsuspecting prey underneath the darkest oceans. The smile on his face, with the crooked teeth, the cigar, contrasting with the bald head and unshaven face increased her sense of panic.

He sometimes thought that the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they were constantly being dazzled as adults. The June after they graduated, the Irvines had gotten them all tickets to Paris, where, it emerged, they had an apartment—“a tiny apartment,” Malcolm had clarified, defensively—in the seventh. He had been to Paris with his mother in junior high, and again with his class in high school, and between his sophomore and junior years of college, but it wasn’t until he had seen Jude’s and Willem’s faces that he was able to most vividly realize not just the beauty of the city but its promise of enchantments. He envied this in them, this ability they had (though he realized that in Jude’s case at least, it was a reward for a long and punitive childhood) to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. He remembered too watching them try uni for the first time, and their reactions—like they were Helen Keller and were just comprehending that that cool splash on their hands had a name, and that they could know it—made him both impatient and intensely envious. What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures?

Ulysses S. Grant became president of the United States in 1869, and he made a priority of expanding the White House stables. During his eight years in office, he sheltered more horses than any other U.S. president. Because he never liked being driven around by a chauffeur, Grant often saddled one of his horses for a solo ride through the streets of Washington, D.C. One day, as he galloped his way down M Street, a police officer pulled him over for speeding! When the officer discovered that the law-breaker was the leader of the country, he was embarrassed. But Grant wasn’t the least bit upset. “I was speeding; you caught me,” he said. So the police officer issued him a $5 ticket, and America’s eighteenth president walked back to the White House on foot.

Only in America do we ask our writers to believe they don't matter as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or do anything of significance. I was already tired o hearing about how the pen was mightier than the sword by the time I was studying writing. Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time. By the time I found that Auden quote -- "poetry makes nothing happen" -- I was more than ready to believe what I thought he was saying. But books were still to me as they had been when I found them: the only magic. My mother's most common childhood memory of me is of standing next to me trying to be heard over the voice of the page. I didn't really commit to writing until I understood that it meant making that happen for someone else. And in order to do that, I had to commit the chaos inside of me to an intricate order, an articulate complexity. To write is to tell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have only seen in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this on, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other. When the writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place and find the writer's eye there, looking through to me. If you don't know what I mean, what I mean is this: when I speak of walking through a snowstorm, you remember a night from your childhood full of snow, or from last winter, say, driving home at night, surprised by a storm. When I speak of my dead friends and poetry, you may remember your own dead friends, or if none of your friends are dead, you may imagine how it might feel to have them die. You may think of your poems, or poems you've seen or heard. You may remember you don't like poetry. Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine. All my life I've been told this isn't important, that it doesn't matter, that it could never matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it's the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.

We were all playing a game, only nobody knew we were playing it. When I walked in that first night, everyone was giving me this look: “I’m dangerous. Don’t fuck with me.” So I went, “Shit, these people are hardened criminals. I shouldn’t be here, because I am not a criminal.” Then the next day everything turned over quickly. One by one, guys left to go to their hearings, I stayed to wait for my lawyer, and new people started to pitch up. Now I was the veteran, doing my colored-gangster routine, giving the new guys the same look: “I’m dangerous. Don’t fuck with me.” And they looked at me and went, “Shit, he’s a hardened criminal. I shouldn’t be here, because I am not like him.” And round and round we went. At a certain point it occurred to me that every single person in that cell might be faking it. We were all decent guys from nice neighborhoods and good families, picked up for unpaid parking tickets and other infractions. We could have been having a great time sharing meals, playing cards, and talking about women and soccer. But that didn’t happen, because everyone had adopted this dangerous pose and nobody talked because everyone was afraid of who the other guys were pretending to be. Now those guys were going to get out and go home to their families and say, “Oh, honey, that was rough. Those were some real criminals in there. There was this one colored guy. Man, he was a killer.

Reasons to keep books: To read them one day! If you hope to read the book one day, definitely keep it. It’s fine to be aspirational; no one else will keep score on what you have actually read. It’s great to dream and hope that one day you do have the time to read all your books. To tell your story. Some people give away every book they’ve read explaining, “What’s the point in keeping a book after I’ve read it if I’m not going to read it again? It’s someone else’s turn to read my copy now.” If that works for you, then only keep books on your shelves that you haven’t read yet. However you can probably understand that the books that you haven’t yet read only tell the story of your future, they don’t say much about where you’ve been and what made you who you are today. To make people think you’ve read the book! This one may be hard or easy for you to admit, but we don’t think there is any shame in it. Sometimes we hold on to books because they represent our aspirational selves, supporting the perception of how well read or intelligent we are. They are certainly the books our ideal selves would read, but in reality—if we had to admit it—we probably never will. We would argue that you should still have these books around. They are part of your story and who you want to be. To inspire someone else in your household to read those books one day. Perhaps it’s your kids or maybe your guests. Keeping books for the benefit of others is thoughtful and generous. At the very least, anyone who comes into your home will know that these are important books and will be exposed to the subjects and authors that you feel are important. Whether they actually read Charles Dickens or just know that he existed and was a prolific writer after seeing your books: mission accomplished! To retain sentimental value. People keep a lot of things that have sentimental value: photographs, concert ticket stubs, travel knickknacks. Books, we would argue, have deeper meaning as sentimental objects. That childhood book of your grandmother's— she may have spent hours and hours with it and perhaps it was instrumental in her education. That is much more impactful than a photograph or a ceramic figurine. You are holding in your hands what she held in her hands. This brings her into the present and into your home, taking up space on your shelves and acknowledging the thread of family and history that unites you. Books can do that in ways that other objects cannot. To prove to someone that you still have it! This may be a book that you are otherwise ready to give away, but because a friend gifted it, you want to make sure you have it on display when they visit. This I’ve found happens a lot with coffee table books. It can be a little frustrating when the biggest books are the ones you want to get rid of the most, yet, you are beholden to keeping them. This dilemma is probably better suited to “Dear Abby” than to our guidance here. You will know if it’s time to part ways with a book if you notice it frequently and agonize over the need to keep it to stay friends with your friend. You should probably donate it to a good organization and then tell your friend you spilled coffee all over it and had to give it away! To make your shelves look good! There is no shame in keeping books just because they look good. It’s great if your books all belong on your shelves for multiple reasons, but if it’s only one reason and that it is that it looks good, that is good enough for us. When you need room for new acquisitions, maybe cull some books that only look good and aren’t serving other purposes.

If, for example, you and I were anteaters, rather than two people sitting in the corner of a bar, I might feel more comfortable with your silence, with your motionless hands holding your glass, with your glazed fish eyes fixing now on my balding head and now on my navel, we might be able to understand each other better in a meeting of restless snouts sniffing halfheartedly at the concrete for nonexistent insects, we might come together, under cover of darkness, in acts of sexual coitus as sad as Lisbon nights, when the Neptunes in the lakes slough off the mud and slime and scan the deserted squares with blank, eager, rust-colored eyes. Perhaps you would finally tell me about yourself. Perhaps behind your Cranach brow there lies sleeping a secret fondness for rhinoceroses. Perhaps, if you felt my body, you would discover that I had been suddenly transformed into a unicorn, and I would embrace you, and you would flap startled arms, like a butterfly transfixed by a pin, your voice grown husky with desire. We would buy tickets for the train that travels around the zoo, from creature to creature, with its clockwork engine, an escapee from some provincial haunted castle, and we would wave, as we passed, at the grotto-cum-crib of those recycled carpets—the polar bears. We would observe with an ophthalmological eye the baboons' anal conjunctivitis, like eyelids inflamed with combustible hemorrhoids. We would kiss outside the lions' den, where the lions—moth-eaten old overcoats—would curl their lips to reveal toothless gums. I would stroke your breasts in the oblique shade cast by the foxes, you would buy me an ice cream on a stick from the clowns' enclosure, where they, eyebrows permanently arched, exchanged blows to the tragic accompaniment of a saxophone. And that way we would have recovered a little of the childhood that belongs to neither of us and that insists on whizzing down the children's slide with a laugh that reaches us now as an occasional faint, almost angry echo.

But his greatest pleasure was the circus. That was something he’d brought with him from childhood. There was never a circus in or outside of El Salvador that he knew about that he didn’t go see. “But aren’t you too busy?” I’d say. “Are you going to be able to take the time?” “You get the tickets, and let’s go!” So we’d go to the circus. When the tightrope walker or the trapeze artist would do their jumps and turns way up in the air, he would get so nervous his hands would sweat. But it was a kind of nervousness he enjoyed. He loved it. And the clowns! The ones with names like “Firuliche” and “Chocolate.” A clown would do a couple of silly tricks, and he would just roar with laughter. I never saw him laugh so hard as he did with the clowns. —Salvador Barraza

stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it—the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.

Some of the story was familiar. The childhood in Poland. The rise of the forces that began to limit their movement. The dread. The aborted education. The father that was shot in front of him; the brothers sent away to die elsewhere. The guilt that he’d survived alone. “The boy who helped me,” Zelig said. “Chaim,” Carl said. “You named me for him.” “He wasn’t dead when I woke up on the morning that I left,” Zelig said. His face had changed and he and Phyllis were now looking at Carl carefully. “What do you mean?” “He was still alive when I left,” Zelig said. “He gave you his ticket to the boat. He gave you his formula.” “No,” Zelig said. “I took it. I went to take it from his hand and he woke up and fought me and I punched him, and I don’t know what happened after that. I ran. I ran and ran, and I never checked. I went to the boat. I came to America. I never found out what happened to him.” Carl shook his head. “No,” he said. “I had to save my life,” Zelig said. “That’s what a war does to you. It turns you into a question mark, and there’s only yes or no. And by then I had no other answers. I had to keep trying. You don’t know when to stop trying when you’re constantly being asked like that.” “So what happened?” “I lived with it. I came here. It was a new world, and I tried to be a new person. But I dreamed of him every night. I wore him like a chain around my ankles. When I died, his face was the last thing I saw.” “Oh no,” Carl said. “Oh no.” “I’m forgiven now,” Zelig said. “Don’t you see? I was judged and then I was finally forgiven.

I call them “the movies.” Never indefinite — “I’m going to a movie” — but instead, a stipulated and familiar certainty: the movies. I do it, perhaps, as a nod to my childhood; to preserve my capacity for dupable wonder. Or possibly, to modify with the slightest article shift, the casual nature of going to a Cineplex, buying my ticket, a soda, some snacks maybe, riding the escalator, and invariably forgetting what theater I’m looking for — was it 9 or 6? I choose to observe these steps as more than just a series of small, unremarkable transactions.

Perhaps it is only someone who has experienced first-hand what family can and should mean who can be so ruthless when they write about those who fall short of producing the ideal for their offspring.

This book is written for all those who loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when they were young, and those who love it now. It's for anyone who wants to know a bit more about how it came to be, how it managed to permeate readers' worlds and the world at large, and how it has endured so happily for fifty years - and counting.

We had watched the Sacramento Kings, my favorite NBA team, playing the Indiana Pacers. The Pacers had won but it was still fun, especially since we had tickets for the third row. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw Vlade Divac and Predrag Stojakovic, two Serbs playing in the Kings, waving at me and saying hello. They recognized the jersey of Divac's former team from Belgrade that I had been wearing.

Srinagar is a city of bunkers. Of the world’s cities, it has the highest military presence. But Srinagar is also a city of absences. It has lost its nights to a decade and a half of curfews, and de facto curfews. It has lost its theatres. Regal, Shiraz, Neelam, Broadway — magical names I longed for throughout my childhood. They were closed before I had grown up enough to walk to a ticket counter on my own, to watch a bad Hindi movie. Srinagar has also lost its multi- religious character, with the migration of the Kashmiri Pandits in the early nineties.

Educational reform over the last century - including, throughout Western democracies, standardised testing, moves to national curriculums, and competitive tertiary entry scores, sems to work on behalf of employers and parent-investors first, allowing them to efficiently read a young person's future without having to go to the trouble of listening to her. Education, from kindergarten coaching to big-ticket degrees, increasingly relies on the professionalisation of childhood and youth.

Supporting such parasites was considerably less of a burden than providing for the armies of ticket collectors, shop assistants, bank clerks, stock-brokers, and so forth, whose main function, when one took the global point of view, was to transfer items from one ledger to another.

Did you two ride a lot when you were younger?” Xaden asks as we pass by a tavern, and more than one mug of ale spills onto white tunics at the outdoor tables at the sight of us. My jaw drops and my head whips in his direction. Leather creaks, and when I glance back, sure enough, Mira is leaning forward in her saddle. “What?” Xaden looks at me, then lifts his brows and glances back at the others. Cat stares at him like he’s grown another head. Dain’s wearing two lines between his brows like he can’t quite figure out if this is a trick question, and Ridoc grins like he’s got front-row tickets to a play. Xaden’s gaze jumps to mine for a second before returning to the road as we take the fork to the right, leading to the market and port according to the rather remarkable signage jammed between the cobblestone and a large tree. “Am I not allowed to ask about your childhood?” “No,” I blurt. “Of course you are.” “It’s just that you usually act like I didn’t grow up with her,” Dain answers casually. “Like we weren’t best friends.” “I’m so fucking glad I got on this horse,” Ridoc says, gripping his reins tighter.