Quotes about childhood
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“In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Love, People, Hurt

“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.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1847
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Heart

“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”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

“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.”

Alice Hoffman book Practical Magic

Source: Practical Magic

Way, Understanding, Personality

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

Stephen King book The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

Source: The Waste Lands

“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.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: A History of Reading

Secret, Books, Universe

“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.”

John Marsden (1950) author

Love

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

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Source: Odd Thomas

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

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

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

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

Source: Men of the Otherworld

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Prose and Poetry

Truth, Youth, Beauty, Game

“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.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: Big Stone Gap

People, Memory, Housing

“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.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: This is Where I Leave You

World, Feeling

“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.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Hope, Summer, Flying

“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.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

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

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Gift

Beauty

“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.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Love, World, Nature

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

Anthony Horowitz book The House of Silk

Source: The House of Silk

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

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

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

Shannon Hale River Secrets

Source: River Secrets

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

Mercedes Lackey (1950) American novelist and short story writer

Source: Elvenborn

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

Cynthia Ozick (1928) American writer

“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.”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Source: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

Truth, History

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

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

“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.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: NOS4A2

Way, Imagination, Adulthood

“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.”

John Irving book Until I Find You

Source: Until I Find You

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.”

Paulo Coelho book The Pilgrimage

Source: The Pilgrimage

World

“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.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

"Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies," lines 1-4, from Wine from These Grapes (1934)

Age, Birth

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

Death, Loss

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

Gordon Korman book The Emperor's Code

Source: The Emperor's Code

World, Family, Business

“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.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

World, Painting

“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?”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

“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.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 12, “Puzzle Pieces Fitting” (p. 88)

Children, Thinking, Future

“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.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth

Children, World, Communication, Learning

“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.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Quoted in the Manchester Guardian (31 December 1977), and Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (1988) https://web.archive.org/web/20000709051930/http://www.bartleby.com/63/90/4790.html edited by James B. Simpson; Says Who?: A Guide To The Quotations Of The Century (1988) by Jonathon Green, p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=xUwOAQAAMAAJ&q=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CK0BEOgBMBk and The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989), p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=bs0J36MpieIC&pg=PA45&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22When%20childhood%20dies%2C%20its%20corpses%20are%20called%20adults%22&f=false

Love, Children, Hell

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

Alex Shakar The Savage Girl

Source: The Savage Girl

Age, Adulthood

“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.”

Daniel H. Wilson book Robopocalypse

Source: Robopocalypse

Dreams

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

John Betjeman (1906–1984) English poet, writer and broadcaster

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

Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes

Source: Calvin and Hobbes

Children, People

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

Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) English novelist

The New York Times, March 1, 1981. http://partners.nytimes.com/books/98/11/29/specials/bainbridge-tenth.html

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

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Food, Family

“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.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Men, World, Girl

“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.”

Sigmund Freud book The Future of an Illusion

Source: 1920s, The Future of an Illusion (1927), Ch. 10

Children, Religion, Idea

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

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

“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…”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Source: The Master and Margarita

Love, Girl, Boy

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

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956) novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist

Source: The Palace of Illusions

Hunger

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

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Future

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

Nicole Krauss book Great House

Source: Great House

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

William Gaddis book The Recognitions

Source: The Recognitions

“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.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Source: The Painter Of Modern Life And Other Essays

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

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Life

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

Jhumpa Lahiri book The Namesake

Source: The Namesake

Life

“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.”

Charles Addams (1912–1988) Cartoonist

Life, People, Dogs, Hell

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

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

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Age, Painting

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

Michel Houellebecq book Atomised

Source: The Elementary Particles

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

Philip Roth book The Ghost Writer

Source: The Ghost Writer

Life, Tree

“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.”

Max Brooks book The Zombie Survival Guide

Source: The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

Way, Water

“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”

Gail Carson Levine (1947) American writer

Source: Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

Adulthood

“… 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.”

Libba Bray book Rebel Angels

Source: Rebel Angels

Children

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

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

Life, Death, Happiness, World

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

James Hillman (1926–2011) American psychologist

Way, Learning

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

Julian Barnes book England, England

Source: England, England

Dreams, Memory

“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.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Pleasure, Feeling, Change

“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.”

Paulo Coelho book Brida

Source: Brida

People, World, Universe, Joy

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

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Pt. I, ch. 1
The Power and the Glory (1940)

Future

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

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

World

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

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

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

Louis De Bernières (1954) English novelist

Source: Corelli's Mandolin

Time

“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.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

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.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

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

Jane Yolen (1939) American speculative fiction and children's writer

Source: Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

Disease, Literature

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

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Happiness, Sadness

“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.”

Christine Feehan American writer

Source: Water Bound

“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.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue, 2004

People, Behavior

“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.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Feeling, Personality

“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.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Life

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

Jimmy Fallon (1974) American TV Personality

“But nothing warps time quite like childhood”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Source: Saga, Vol. 3

Time

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

Y. C.: An unhappy childhood.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Source: Ernest Hemingway on Writing

Training

“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.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Children, Youth, Parent, Help

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

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), III: “L’artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant”
Variant: Genius is nothing but youth recaptured.
Source: The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“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.”

Richelle Mead Bloodlines

Source: Bloodlines

Love, Cars, Moms, Memory

“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.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book The Namesake

Source: The Namesake

Life, People

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

Dave Pelzer (1960) American author

Source: A Child Called "It"

Soul, Sun

“An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.”

Martha Grimes (1931) American crime writer and literature professor

Source: The Lamorna Wink

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

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Jace to Clary, pg. 232
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

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

Karen White (1964) American writer

Source: The Memory of Water

Siblings

“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.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly

Imagination, Personality

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

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

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

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Religion

“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.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

Love, Memory, Heart, Christmas

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

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

Horse

“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.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea (1955)
Context: The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many other things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.
But I want first of all — in fact, as an end to these other desires — to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact — to borrow from the languages of the saints — to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.
Context: The shape of my life today starts with a family. I have a husband, five children and a home just beyond the suburbs of New York. I have also a craft, writing, and therefore work I want to pursue. The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many other things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.
But I want first of all — in fact, as an end to these other desires — to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact — to borrow from the languages of the saints — to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from Phaedrus when he said, "May the outward and the inward man be at one." I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.

Life, Education, Heart