If we knew how long a night or a day was to a child, we might understand a great deal more about childhood. Could it not be that the deeply formative nature of early childhood experience is due not only to the force of its impact…but also to the fact that by the child’s own reckoning, the experience continues for so long? It may be that, subjectively, a childhood is at least equal in length to the rest of a lifetime. The phenomenon of old people, when their daily practical preoccupations are reduced to a minimum, remembering more and more about their childhood may confirm this: subjectively, their childhood was perhaps most of their life.

- John Berger, A Fortunate Man