Quotes about childhood

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“Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.”

“I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them”

“No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.”

“Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.”

“At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.”

“There are some things that once you've lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third.”

“Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.”

“The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.”

“Kids who don't eavesdrop on adult conversations are doomed to a childhood of ignorance.”

“I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.”

“People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.”

“Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.”

“These bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.”

“Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.”

“Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.”

“You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.”

“Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.”

“Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.”

“Razo was sorely tempted to assert that all was true and he'd lost his horns and tail in a tragic childhood accident”

“It isn't wise to be rude to one's mother. She knows everything about your childhood that is potentially embarassing.”

“What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”

“For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.”

“The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.”

“In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”

“I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm.”

“Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is.”

“To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.”

“In our family, you don't get a childhood. We're too busy trying to dominate the world.”

“Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your drowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.”

“What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?”

“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”

“Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.”

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.”

“Childhood and adulthood were not factors of age but states of mind.”

“No matter how much kids beg to be treated like adults, nobody likes to let go of their childhood. You wish for it and dream of it and the second you have it, you wonder what you've done. You wonder what it is you've become.”

“Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.”

“People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.”

“Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.”

“The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out his nose.”

“As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist.”

“In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.”

“Delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood.”

“This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel…”

“Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you.”

“The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”

“… after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?”

“It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.”

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

“Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.”

“It's hard to say. Sometimes people have had terrible childhoods. And sometimes they just haven't found their special place in life. And sometimes they're dogs from hell and must be destroyed.”

“Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.”

“Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.”

“He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.”

“In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees”

“Hooking on scuba gear and blindly diving into zombie-infested water is a wonderful way to mix the two childhood terrors of being eaten and drowning.”

“When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you”

“… I do have to wonder what sort of childhood the Grimm brothers endured. They are not a merry bunch of storytellers, what with their children roasted by witches, maidens poisoned by old crones, and whatnot.”

“My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.”

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year… death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

“Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.”

“Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”

“I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.”

“Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.”

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

“After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.”

“the late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood…”

“Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?”

“These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.”

“What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.”

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”

“Albums that remind me of my childhood happiness make me incredibly sad now.”

“If you need to talk about your childhood, you’re safe with me. If you need to break into a million pieces, I’m right here, Lev. I’ll find them all, I’m good at details, and I’ll put you back together. You’re safe here.”

“I knew there was never anyone to blame when people get into drugs. They're always responsible for their own behavior, and it's not the dealer, and it's not the friend, it's not the childhood.”

“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.”

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”

“Sometimes I wish I had a terrible childhood, so that at least I'd have an excuse.”

“But nothing warps time quite like childhood”

“Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?

Y. C.: An unhappy childhood.”

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”

“I’d been raised to be practical and keep my
emotions in check, but I loved cars. That was one of the few
legacies I’d picked up from my mom. She was a mechanic,
and some of my best childhood memories were of working
in the garage with her.”

“Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.”

“Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.”

“An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.”

“If there was such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood”

“They say that not matter how old you become, when you are with your siblings, you revert back to childhood.”

“Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.”

“the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”

“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.”

“Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmastime.”

“And if wishes were horses, I’d have been run over in childhood.”

“The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.”

“… nobody was ever really ready to turn off their mother's machine, no matter what they thought; to turn off the light of their childhood and walk away, just as if they were turning out a light and leaving a room.”

“Childhood romances always seem so real, so enduring, when we are separated from the object of our affection. But usually, when we return, we find that our dreams and memories quiet surpassed reality.

-Lady Anne, Whitney's aunt”

“Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.”

“It's funny how much of your childhood is about proximity.”

“To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days”