Quotes about childhood
page 4

“Houses and fields in which we lived and played in childhood and youth with those we loved, grow to be part of our being. The sight of them in later years touches us with mystic charm. It is like a vision from beyond the tomb or a memory of a lost Paradise. But little by little their power over us grows less and the light that falls on them becomes more like the common day. Their sacredness diminishes, their beauty fades. The young birds have flown, the old are dead, the leaves and blossoms have fallen and but the empty nest is left among the naked boughs; and looking on the desolation we feel that we have no abiding place on earth, since the home itself loses its consecration.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 137

Love, Youth, Beauty, Feeling

“Like most people, I spent my childhood eating meat, wearing leather, and loving the cats, dogs, and mice I grew up with — and not once recognizing that I was treating some animals with respect and others as faceless commodities. I was well into adulthood before I understood that such an inconsistency is as ridiculous as it is unjust. The truth is, we have an impoverished understanding of the animals we share this planet with, and that has led to more than a little hubris on our part. … Humanity's abuse of animals can be merciless in the extreme, and in trying to relate such cruelties faithfully, I have written about incidents and industry practices that may disgust you. But it is crucial that we see beyond the veil that hides this world of suffering from us. Equally important, we need to know that there is some optimism amid all the despair. And so we begin with a story of hope.”

Mark Hawthorne (author) (1962) American activist

Bleating Hearts: The Hidden World of Animal Suffering (Changemakers Books, 2013), Introduction https://books.google.it/books?id=mXHvAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT15.

Love, People, Truth, World

“A happy childhood means - or ought to mean - that one's first experience of the world is a true experience - not yet comprehensive, of course, yet comprehending the prime reality, so that it becomes an experience of an essential order which thenceforward will serve as a basis of comparison, in whose light all future falsification, all disorder, will be recognised as wrong and invalid. A happy childhood means above all a loved child. Because Thérèse was a happy child, her beginnings could contain perfection. Because she was a loved child, she received from the beginning the knowledge that others must struggle towards so consciously, with such difficulty, by painfully strenuous detours: the simple truth that to so many of us seems the most incredible and amazing lesson of religion: that we can be loved without having deserved it: that grace comes first.. It is bliss simply to be someone's child, a child of a father, of a mother, living, moving and having its being in a love which is unmerited, unmeritable, anticipatory, unconditional and immutable. On this basic mystery and reality Thérèse's childhood was built. This was the source of her subsequent doctrine of the way of spiritual childhood.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

The Hidden Face p. 48-49.

Love, Happiness, Truth, World

“Planning a good society as far ahead as one can see, does not mean that our adventures have ended; they have just begun. Human nature is growing up. As we put behind us the accidents and tears of childhood squabbles and the wooden swords and shields, and begin to try on our new space pilots'" uniform, so to speak, we begin to see what we can teach ourselves and what we can really become with new self-control over new adult powers.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

Cited in: Bernhard Joseph Stern ed. Science and Society. p. 135
Source: The step to man, 1966, p.169.

Nature, Tear

“It seems like a cliche, but you do grow up a lot faster when you travel a lot, go through things like this interview, spend time away from home and hang around with other actors. It's inevitable that you're not going to have a so-called normal childhood.”

Matt Dillon (1964) American actor

Michael Blowen (November 3, 1983) "Matt Dillon Meets Fame ....Diffidently", The Boston Globe.

Travel, Home, Time

“You were so kind to us yesterday. Never have I seen such magnanimity and such tenderness.
Can you imagine the gift you gave me? To return to the White House privately with my little ones while they are still young enough to rediscover their childhood — with you both as guides — and with your daughters, such extraordinary young women.
What a tribute to have brought them up like that in the limelight. I pray I can do half the same with my Caroline. It was good to see her exposed to their example, and John to their charm!
You spoiled us beyond belief... I have never seen the White House look so perfect. There is no hidden corner of it that is not beautiful now.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Letter to Richard and Pat Nixon after a White House visit (February 1971)] as quoted in "Can You Imagine The Gift You Gave Me?" by Bob Greene, in The Chicago Tribune (28 July 1999) http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-07-28/features/9907280018_1_white-house-john-kennedy-richard-nixon-library

Women, Beauty, Imagination, Housing

“Here is how my father appeared to me as a boy. He came from a race of giants and demi-gods from a mythical land known as Chicago. He married the most beautiful girl ever to come crawling out of the poor and lowborn south, and there were times when I thought we were being raised by Zeus and Athena. After Happy Hour my father would drive his car home at a hundred miles an hour to see his wife and seven children. He would get out of his car, a strapping flight jacketed matinee idol, and walk toward his house, his knuckles dragging along the ground, his shoes stepping on and killing small animals in his slouching amble toward the home place. My sister, Carol, stationed at the door, would call out, "Godzilla's home!" and we seven children would scamper toward the door to watch his entry. The door would be flung open and the strongest Marine aviator on earth would shout, "Stand by for a fighter pilot!" He would then line his seven kids up against the wall and say, "Who's the greatest of them all?" "You are, O Great Santini, you are." "Who knows all, sees all, and hears all?" "You do, O Great Santini, you do."”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

We were not in the middle of a normal childhood, yet none of us were sure since it was the only childhood we would ever have. For all we knew other men were coming home and shouting to their families, "Stand by for a pharmacist," or "Stand by for a chiropractor".
Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot (1998)

Men, God, Happiness, Children

“Childhood whose very happiness is love.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)

Love, Happiness

“In ancient shadows and twilights
Where childhood had strayed,
The world’s great sorrows were born
And its heroes were made.
In the lost boyhood of Judas
Christ was betrayed.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

"Germinal" in Vale and Other Poems (1931)

World, Christ

“So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn't get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church's pension fund to invest, but I didn't. I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors' money, but I didn't want to go to hell too. Shows what I know. Another of my partners got the Episcopal Church pension fund to invest. Today there are a lot of happy retired priests who should thank him. That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I'm pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. At a time when nobody thought we'd ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana. Today Steel Dynamics is one of the largest steel producers in the United States.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2012-08-31
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160357612/transcript-mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech
Transcript: Mitt Romney's Acceptance Speech
NPR
[2012-08-30, gopconvention2012, Mitt Romney: Introduction (video), YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_cGyPwt5UI]
2012

Money, Happiness, People, Hell

“How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood,
When fond recollection presents them to view.”

Samuel Woodworth The Old Oaken Bucket

The Old Oaken Bucket (1817)

Heart

“IT is in this we differ; I would seek
To blend my very being into thine—
I'm even jealous of thy memory:
I wish our childhood had been pass'd together.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Ancestress (Spoken by Bertha to Jaromir)
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Memory

“Our own childhood was totally different. I guess when you are left on your own, you find your true potential. I remember my father never came to our school even once. Nevertheless, he was hugely interested in our all-round development for which he did some amazing things.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Always invest in businesses of the future and in talent

School

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")

To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.

Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.

The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.

Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.

But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money, Family, Way, Feeling

“I did all my real growing up in France, which I was almost not allowed to do at home. They liked my voice, they found me sexy, they didn't know anything about my childhood. In England, you’d come on to a bright cheerful song, do a bit of comedy, finish on a big ballad and wear a sparkly dress. That was about it. Suddenly I saw people like Aznavour and Piaf, songs coming from your heart, your soul, your guts, your sex, whatever, songs about everything, life and death, love and hate, wow! I realised you can use all of you when you perform.”

Petula Clark (1932) British actress and singer

Calgary Herald, 14 Feb 2013

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Travel

“Perhaps our childhoods are buried inside all of us. Perhaps they set the pattern for our futures,’ I suggested.
‘In that case I am doomed by mine,’ she said without self-pity.
‘Perhaps not, for you are aware of it,’ I said.”

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

Ch 18
The Rahotep series, Book 2: Tutankhamun

Future

“The odds on any intelligent person having an unhappy childhood are better than fair, and the odds on a sad ending are practically off the board.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker" (1973) p. 159
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Sadness, Intelligence, Personality

“What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, / And what bright unreal path has led me here?”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Lines from an early poem, letter to J.B. Sutton, 16 April 1941

“We wince at the brutality of parents who ship their young kids around to perform for adults at the expense of their childhood — but, then, that was Mozart’s childhood, and though by the end Mozart may have wished for less attention as a kid performer and more as a grownup composer, he never for a moment wished not to be Mozart.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

Parent

“Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?”

Anton Chekhov book The Bishop

The Bishop (1902)

Time

“My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of half century.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Mi padre, al irse, regaló medio siglo a mi niñez.
Voces (1943)

“The phrase "a literature of decadence" implies a scale of literature: infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc. This term, I would say, supposes something fateful and providential, like an inescapable decree; and it is completely unjust to reproach us for the fulfillment of a law that is mysterious. All I can understand of this academic saying is that it is shameful to obey this law pleasurably, and that we are guilty of rejoicing in our destiny.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Le mot littérature de décadence implique qu'il y a une échelle de littératures, une vagissante, une puérile, une adolescente, etc. Ce terme, veux-je dire, suppose quelque chose de fatal et de providentiel, comme un décret inéluctable; et il est tout à fait injuste de nous reprocher d'accomplir la loi mystérieuse. Tout ce que je puis comprendre dans la parole académique, c'est qu'il est honteux d'obéir à cette loi avec plaisir, et que nous sommes coupables de nous réjouir dans notre destinée. XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," I http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Edgar_Poe_III._Notes_nouvelles_sur_Edgar_Poe_%28L%E2%80%99Art_romantique%29#I L'art romantique (1869)

Fate, Pleasure, Law, Literature

“Children being left, it's not always like books of Charles Dickens. When you lose your parents in childhood, it's a fact of life, and, you know, human beings are extraordinary powerful survivors. My mother commit suicide. I was lucky it was not in front of me. O. K.? Which is truth, and Father was confused, and we never had any relationship, serious relationship. I never knew my father, in a way. But what? It's made me different? No, I mean. I blame for every fuckups in my life my parents? No. [Pause] I got lucky. I fell in love with dance.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948) Soviet-American dancer, choreographer, and actor born in Letonia, Soviet Union

As quoted in "Profile: The Soloist", reprinted in Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker https://books.google.com/books?id=KDhjzXAjyUMC&pg=PA66, p. 66.

Love, Life, Children, Truth

“Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 637

Women, Friendship, Nature, Suffering

“These children need to feel the same things as other children. To play, to laugh and cry, to make friends, to enjoy the ordinary experiences of childhood. To feel loved and nurtured and included by the world they live in, without the stigma that AIDS continues to attract.”

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997) First wife of Charles, Prince of Wales

The Princess of Wales during a speech about women and children with Aids (8 September 1993) http://www.settelen.com/diana_women_and_children_with_aids.htm

Love, Children, World, Feeling

“If someone were to expound that godliness is to belong to childhood in the temporal sense and thus dwindle and die with the years as childhood does, is to be a happy frame of mind that cannot be preserved but only recollected; if someone were to expound that repentance as a weakness of old age accompanies the decline of one’s powers, when the senses are dulled, when sleep no longer strengthens but increases lethargy-this would be ungodliness and foolishness.”

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

Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Hong p. 12
1840s

Happiness, Age, Sense, Sleep

“From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), pp. 12-13

Death, Way, Feeling, Grass

“Above all I feel that you must resign yourself to taking me as I am, that is, with the congenital quality (or weakness) which ever since my childhood has caused my spiritual life to be completely dominated by a sort of profound 'feeling' for the organic realness of the World. At first it was an ill-defined feeling in my mind and heart, but as the years have gone by it has gradually become a precise, compelling sense of the Universe's general convergence upon itself; a convergence which coincides with, and culminates at its zenith in, him in quo omina constant, and whom the Society has taught me to love.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Letter from Cape Town to Father General, Jean-Baptiste Janssens (12 October 1951)

Love, Life, World, Feeling

“One of the most profound and universal realizations of later childhood, a realization that probably is never totally integrated, is the discovery that one's parents are not necessarily representative of the human species, that one has grown up in an idiosyncratically structured family with its own peculiarities and dramas.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 275

Family, Parent, Universe

“In short, enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it and do not bewail it when it is gone, unless, forsooth, you believe that youth must lament the loss of infancy, or early manhood the passing of youth. Life's race-course is fixed; Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its own appropriate quality; so that the weakness of childhood, the impetuosity of youth, the seriousness of middle life, the maturity of old age—each bears some of Nature's fruit, which must be garnered in its own season.”
Denique isto bono utare, dum adsit, cum absit, ne requiras: nisi forte adulescentes pueritiam, paulum aetate progressi adulescentiam debent requirere. cursus est certus aetatis et una via naturae eaque simplex, suaque cuique parti aetatis tempestivitas est data, ut et infirmitas puerorum et ferocitas iuvenum et gravitas iam constantis aetatis et senectutis maturitas naturale quiddam habet, quod suo tempore percipi debeat.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

section 33 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0039%3Asection%3D33 Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age (44 BC)

Life, Youth, Age, Nature

“Humankind is a lonely creature looking for connections and associations from childhood to the end of his life. This intention to join with the others can also be found in human societies. Stories, legends and most of human efforts tend to a joint and union, the same direction towards which the humankind is heading. The definition of a human being in this theory is not considered to be a good or a devil self. Man is defined as a social creature craving for establishing relationships and connections, without which he will be unable to survive. Linking up with another thing, establishing connections with God, relating to different points of view, associating with dreams and in its most general form sharing life with a spouse are all examples of this instinct in human beings. In a similar pattern, civilizations of the world are following, and will be following, the same path. This is the era of Collaboration of Civilizations, Union of Cultures, and Joining of Religions.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

360 Doctrines and Comprehensive Theories, Union of Civilizations

Life, God, World, Religion

“On this day I remember words that have stayed with me since my childhood and which matter a great deal to me today, my school motto: "I will try my outmost". This is my promise to all of the people of Britain and now let the work of change begin.”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Statement at Downing Street http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page12155.asp, 27 June 2007. Statement outside 10 Downing Street immediately after becoming Prime Minister. The motto referred to is an English translation of the Latin Usque conabor. Brown said "outmost", as spelled on the BBC News transcript http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6246114.stm, but other sources usually give "utmost". Prime Minister

People, School, Change

“Initially I observed, in sweeping, panoramic vision, a perpetually metamorphosing Persian rug. A few minutes later these patterns segued into cinematic images from childhood—it was kind of like watching home movies.”

David Woodard (1964) American writer, conductor and businessman

LA Weekly (Jul. 26 - Aug. 1, 1996)

Home

“Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and the triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossing and connections casual, dialogues imminently (sic) forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 284)

Life, Family, Wedding, Memory

“To have even known such a man as he was is an inestimable boon. To have been with him for so long as a child, to have known so intimately the man who above all others has understood childhood, is indeed a memory on which to look back with thanksgiving and with tears.”

Isa Bowman (1874–1958) British actress

Page 3.
The Story of Lewis Carroll (1899)

Tear, Memory

“The hope of the nation and of Christendom, and of the lands called heathen, alike is to be found in the indoctrination of little children in the knowledge of God's truth; for the missionaries will tell you that the adult heathen population of to-day are to die heathen; the minister will tell you that the adult, virtually heathen population of Christian lands to-day are to die in that condition, unless God showers down altogether unprecedented grace — with only such occasional exceptions as confirm this general and terrible law. If this be so, the hope of Christianity is in childhood. Towards childhood must be directed the work of the sappers and miners of the church. Here is the weak point of the enemy's fortress. Here let the breach be made, and his topmost turret shall be laid low.”

Cyrus David Foss (1834–1910) American bishop

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 570.

God, Children, Truth, Law

“Allow me to congratulate you, and, through you, the people of Oregon, that peace and prosperity surround us. The prospects for Oregon were never more promising, save the shadows from the fires of secession which are blazing around our childhood homes. Though we have had a winter of unprecedented severity and devastating floods, no traitorous hand has been raised to tear down our national flag and subvert our beloved institutions.”

A. C. Gibbs (1825–1886) American politician

A. C. Gibbs (September 1862) " Governor A. C. Gibbs Inaugural Address, 1862 http://records.sos.state.or.us/ORSOSWebDrawer/Recordpdf/6777833", Oregon State Archives, Oregon Secretary of State, Source: Journals. Local Laws Oregon., 1862, Appendix, Special Message, Page 58.

People, Peace, Home, Tear

“I thought that prattling boys and girls
Would fill this empty room;
That my rich heart would gather flowers
From childhood's opening bloom.

One child and two green graves are mine,
This is God's gift to me;
A bleeding, fainting, broken heart—
This is my gift to Thee.”

Elizabeth Prentiss (1818–1878) American musician, hymnwriter

On the death of her child (1852), reported in The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss (1882), p. 138.

God, Girl, Boy, Flowers

“The following anecdote is related of Sultan Shamsuddin Iltutmish. He was greatly enamoured of a Turkish slave girl in his harem, whom he had purchased, and sought her caresses, but was always unable to achieve his object. One day he was seated, having his head anointed with some perfumed oil by the hands of the same slave girl, when he felt some tears fall on his head. On looking up, he found that she was weeping. He inquired of her the cause. She replied, “Once I had a brother who had such a bald place on his head as you have, and it reminds me of him.” On making further inquiries it was found that the slave girl was his own sister. They had both been sold as slaves, in their early childhood, by their half-brothers; and thus had Almighty God saved him from committing a great sin. Badaoni states in his work, “I heard this story myself, from the emperor Akbar’s own lips, and the monarch stated that this anecdote had been orally traced to Sultan Ghiyasuddin Balban himself.””

Iltutmish (1210–1236) Sultan of Mamluk Sultanate

Minhaj, 506, 526n. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 12

God, Girl, Sister, Tear

“I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

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

Giles Whittell, " The world according to Richard Dawkins http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4191347.ece" (), The Times, quoted in Trevor Grundy, " Richard Dawkins Pedophilia Remarks Provoke Outrage http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/richard-dawkins-pedophilia_n_3895514.html" (), The Huffington Post.

People, Way, Personality

“When my grandfather was born there were barely two thousand people living in the capital; in my own childhood there were nearly five thousand. In grandfather's childhood the only people who counted were a few government officials and a few foreign merchants, mainly Jews from Schleswig and Holstein who spoke Low German and called themselves Danes... The rest of the town's inhabitants were cottagers who went out to the fishing and sometimes owned a small share in a cow, or had a few sheep. They had little rowing-boats, on which they could sometimes hoist a sail.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

People, Fish

“Ever since childhood I have suspected you get along better if you respect people’s ways and wishes regardless of your apparent relative strengths.
That doesn’t mean you let people walk on you. It doesn’t mean you eat their pain for them. You need to demand respect for yourself, too.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 25 (p. 67)

Pain, People, Way

“I've only had three idols in my life. Johnny Unitas, the quarterback for the Colts, Richard Nixon, and Chris Squire, the bass player for Yes-Squire being my number one. My love, fascination and devotion for Chris Squire is deep. The pain of my whole childhood was sedated by listening to Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis records. And now here I am, 25 years later, and my Yes obsession is the only thing I haven't outgrown.”

Vincent Gallo (1961) American film director, writer, model, actor and musician

Filmmaker Magazine Interview

Love, Life, Pain

“I guess I don’t subscribe to the twee school. I remember trying to lose our copy of Thomas the Tank Engine before I had to read it again. Life is a more dimensional and interesting affair than vestigially Victorian notions of childhood. I was trying to make something substantial, something to be read and reread.”

Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States

On his book Jack and the Box, as quoted in "Smart Art : Spiegelman doesn’t dumb down for kids" by Alexandra Zissu in New York Magazine (16 November 2008) http://nymag.com/family/kids/52136/.

Life, School, Reading

“Many take the name of God after receiving blows in life. But he who can offer his mind like a flower at the feet of the Lord right up from childhood is indeed blessed.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

Women Saints of East and West

Life, God, Flowers

“The second childhood of a saint is the early infancy of a happy immortality, as we believe.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 438.

Happiness

“The language others speak to us, from childhood, shapes the attitudes and beliefs that ground how we use all our powers of action.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 1

“She was by some standards slovenly, failing to see any virtue in made beds, since, as she put it, you are either asleep or somewhere else. On her birthdays she was sad. This tradition traced to earliest childhood, when she had consistently misinterpreted her birthday parties to mean that she was dying. Why else would the world be going to such exorbitant lengths to cheer her up?
Science was her first love. Long after the preschool years, she aspired to know the why of everything. Why babies had a Babinski reflex, and why the reflex disappeared. Why people licked their upper lips when concentrating, and why there was humor. Tez wanted to understand light. She wanted to solve mud, decipher rocks, and unlock grass.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 4 (p. 48)

Love, People, World, Sadness

“What a childhood I had. Once on my birthday my ol' man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away.”

Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004) American actor and comedian

Source: It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect But Plenty of Sex and Drugs (2004), p. 7

Birthday

“A banal fever hallucination, soon obliterated and forgotten; it didn't reappear in M's memory until about thirty years later (on 10 August 1925), as he sat alone on a rainy day in a little inn by the seaside, staring at the wooden floor which had been scored by years of scrubbing, and noticed that the grain had started moving of its own accord (much like the lines on the [imitation] mahogany board of his childhood). As with the mahogany board back then, and as with visions seen between sleeping and waking, the lines formed shifting, changing images, blurred at first but then increasingly precise. Max {Ernst] decided to pursue the symbolism of this compulsory inspiration and, in order to sharpen his meditative and hallucinatory skills, he took a series of drawings from the floorboards. Letting pieces of paper drop at random on the floor, he rubbed over them with a black pencil. On careful inspection of the impressions made in this way, he was surprised by the sudden increase they produced in his visionary abilities. His curiosity was aroused. He was delighted, and began making the same type of inquiry into all sorts of materials, whatever caught his eye – leaves with their ribs, the frayed edges of sacking, the strokes of a palette knife in a 'modern' painting, thread rolling off a spool, and so forth. To quote 'Beyond Painting' These drawings, the first fruits of the frottage technique, were collected under the title 'Histoire Naturell.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, pp.283/284
1910 - 1935

Way, Quotes, Sleep, Memory

“The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us. That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: The History of Childhood (1974), Ch. 1, The Evolution of Childrearing, opening paragraph.

Life, Children, Home, History

“In place… of "elementary" education for nine-tenths of the children and "secondary" education for the exceptionally fortunate or the exceptionally able, we need to envisage education as two stages in a single course which will embrace the whole development of childhood and adolescence up to sixteen, and obliterate the vulgar irrelevances of class inequality and economic pressure in a new educational synthesis.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Secondary Education For All (1922)

Children, Education

“Night, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers "Free at Last" in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

Pleasure, Singing, Night

“Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.”

Truman Capote book Local Color

Local Color (1950)

Wisdom, Age, Past

“Pills are the great infantilizers of our time. Adulthood can be wearying, and so some grow nostalgic about childhood dependencies.”

Antonella Gambotto-Burke book The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

Source: The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide (2004), P. 22.

Time, Dependency, Adulthood

“I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques [in North-Spain, where Dali spent his childhood], each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of mt erotic-emotional life.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from the catalog of the exhibition 'Dali una vida de libro', Bibliotheca de Catalunya, Barcelona 2004
Dali's memory is written in a mixture of French and Catalan accent
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989

Life, Fear, Solitude, Light

“It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped?
One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults.
Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man.
Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), Chapter 10: The Ethics of Helplessness and Helpfulness.

Life, Religion, Game, Idea

“If there's anything that I can tell people that are being bullied, it's that the bullies are really the ones that are hurting. Playing Lauren Tanner made me realize that she was evil because she was harboring so much pain from her childhood. And if there's anything I would tell anyone who is being bullied, it's to just let it go. Bullies are the insecure ones and the ones who are trying to get a rise out of you to make themselves feel better.”

Cassie Scerbo (1990) American actress, singer and dancer

Interview: "Sharknado" Star Cassie Scerbo Talks Being a Fanboy Favorite and Her Upcoming Music http://amp.uk.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/07/interview-sharknado-star-cassie-scerbo (July 24, 2013)

Pain, People, Feeling, Evil

“And at that point, too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man's choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own "companion for life", becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the "higher spiritual affinity" in which both parties are "free"—free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say "that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself." The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding"….
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.
If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar "decline" of the Classical, which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants. The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Caesarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children laws of Augustus—amongst them the Lex de maritandis ordinibus, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus's legions—the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents—nothing availed to check the process.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, pp. 104–06 https://archive.org/stream/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West#page/n573/mode/2up/search/depopulation The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)

Life, Marriage, Children, World

“T was ever thus from childhood’s hour!
My fondest hopes would not decay:
I never loved a tree or flower
Which was the first to fade away.”

Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884) British poet

Disaster; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare:
Oh, ever thus, from childhood’s hour,
I ’ve seen my fondest hopes decay;
I never loved a tree or flower
But ’t was the first to fade away.
- Thomas Moore, The Fire Worshippers, p. 26.

Love, Hope, Flowers, Tree

“…might possibly preserve her from suicide inasmuch as she remembered one of Amadeus's favorite utterances: Love, know thyself first in order to love thy neighbour. And then: one has to go into oneself - into one's childhood - to be able to go out of oneself. And he felt that the movie was the machine of modern man as a means of going out of oneself. And finally she recalled the famous couple embracing under a bathrobe, functioning as one person.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 5th ending, written page in brush, related to no. 4923r https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004923/part/character/theme/keyword/M004923JHM: (554) 'Life? or Theater..', p. 819 Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Love, Suicide, Personality

“It was a strange life, I suppose, but it was the only one I’ve ever known. What is a normal childhood anyway?”

Petula Clark (1932) British actress and singer

On being a child star.
Calgary Herald, 14 Feb 2013

Life

“Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“I begin with two memories of my childhood. Don't ask me why, because I do not know. Perhaps because it helps to get things started.”

Saeed Akhtar Mirza (1943) Indian film director

Ammi:Letter to a Democratic Mother http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammi:_Letter_to_a_Democratic_Mother%28Book%29

Memory, Help

“I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.”

Jean Genet book The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal (1949)

Suffering, Time

“It needs very little reflection to see that a school for rich children only cannot be a rational school. From the very nature of things it will tend to insist on the maintenance of privilege and the securing of their advantages. The only sound and enlightened form of school is that which co-educates the poor and the rich, which brings the one class into touch with the other in the innocent equality of childhood, by means of the systematic equality of the rational school.”

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909) Spanish anarchist

The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1908)

Children, Education, School, Nature

“If you analyze a host of real world outcomes using adoption studies, fraternal v. identical twin studies, twins-raised-apart studies, the history of early childhood intervention research, naturally-occurring experiments, differences between societies, changes over history, and so forth, you tend to come up with nature and nurture as being about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty. The glass is roughly half-full and half-empty.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

A Short, Stylized Dialogue On Epigenetics, Steve, Sailer, VDARE.com, October 25, 2012, October 27, 2012 http://www.vdare.com/posts/a-short-stylized-dialogue-on-epigenetics,

World, History, Nature, Study

“After graduation I was offered a post as Vice-Principal at the Jat High School but in that there was the name of a caste and I could not accept that. I have always been opposed to this social system since my childhood.”

Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India

Stig Toft Madsen, et al, in: Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia http://books.google.co.in/books?id=6w7JVOlDIokC&pg=PA80, Anthem Press, 2011, P.80

School

“Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child.
A ritual, more compelling than ever devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forebears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe’s childhood.
The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter ‘Weep’. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak ‘Rejoice!’ O little revolution in great shades!”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 1, section 1 (p. 399; opening words)

Law, Fight

“No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.”

Peter Ackroyd (1949) English author

Chatterton (London: Abacus, [1987] 1991), ch. 10, p. 151.

Secret, Reading

“I have a few childhood nicknames. One is "Babygirl". My father gave that to me when I was born. He said, "I have a beautiful baby girl" and that one stuck with me. A lot of people still call me "Babygirl".”

Aaliyah (1979–2001) American singer, actress and model

MTV Stripped interview (2001)

People, Beauty, Girl, Baby

“I had a mitherable childhood. Nobody loved me. I think I have a right to try again, looking pwettier, don't you?”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

Source: Castle Series, House of Many Ways (2008), p. 306.

Love, Thinking

“Family trips of my childhood always began with a prayer. I suppose when one goes on vacation, one is courting death in some fashion, tying the morgue tags onto one’s suitcase. But then, too, vacations are respites from death, from thoughts of death. I have sometimes wondered why friends under medical death sentences have undertaken arduous trips or undertaken arduous labors. To put some distance between themselves and death—the obvious answer.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Death, Family, Fashion

“Most merciful and gracious God, who hast preserved me unto this hour, I most humbly acknowledge Thee as the guide and companion of my youth. Thou hast protected me through the dangers of infancy and childhood, and in my youth Thou didst bless me with the full enjoyment, the happy intimacy, of the best of fathers. Be as gracious and merciful then as Thou hast hitherto been, now that I am about to enter a new stage of existence. Teach me, I beseech Thee, to strengthen in my soul the cultivation of Thy truth, the recollection of the uncertainty of life, the greatness of the objects for which I was created. Revive those delightful religious impressions which in early days I felt more strongly than now; and as Thou hast been pleased lately to permit me to look to a way of life to which formerly I dared not to do, let the leisure I shall enjoy enlarge my warmth of heart towards Thee. Make every branch of study which I may pursue strengthen my confidence in Thy ever-ruling providence, that, undeceived by views of false philosophy, I may ever in singleness of heart elevate my mind from Thy works unto Thy divine essence. Keep from me a vain and overbearing spirit; let me- ever have a thorough sense of my own ignorance and weakness; and keep me through all the trials and troubles of a transitory state in body and soul unto everlasting life, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.”

James David Forbes (1809–1868) Scottish physicist and glaciologist

"Completing my Twenty-first Year" (1839), a prayer written by Forbes on April 20th, 1830. Life and letters of James David Forbes p. 450.

Life, God, Happiness, Truth

“There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness.”

John Varley (1947) American science fiction author

"In the Bowl", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (December 1975), reprinted in The Persistence of Vision (1978)

World, Question

“Only one language comes into question from the start, and that is the physicalist. One can learn the physicalist language from earliest childhood. If someone makes predictions and wants to check them himself, he must count on changes in the system of his senses, he must use clocks and rulers, in short, the person supposedly in isolation already makes use of the ‘intersensual’ and ‘intersubjective’ language. The forecaster of yesterday and the controller of today are, so to speak, two persons.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: 1930s, "Physicalism" (1931), p. 54–55 ; As cited in Jordi Cat, "Otto Neurath", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),

Question, Sense, Learning, Change

“Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Introduction
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Love, Age

“Standing, with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Maidenhood http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/12212, st. 3 (1842).

“There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream,
And the nightingale sings round it all the day long;
In the time of my childhood 'twas like a sweet dream,
To sit in the roses and hear the bird's song.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Part II. Lalla Rookh http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/lallarookh/index.html (1817), Part I-III: The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan

Dreams, Bird, Singing, Time

“In childhood, the impetus of conversation is curiosity. The child talks to ask questions. But one of its first lessons, as it advances, is that a question is an intrusion, and an answer a deceit.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Question