Quotes About Childhood

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a person is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

To tell the truth I cannot call my childhood bad. In your childhood you can't compare things: one eats carrots, one eats candy, both taste good. As a child you cannot tell the difference.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

I felt I had a very innocent childhood and I feel privileged by that. But as an adult, I know that there were people who didn't have that. There are a lot of teens who haven't had as easy a childhood as me, and having literature that explores these "darker" parts helps relieve the burden and stress they may be feeling. As a writer, there is often a temptation to draw back when we write for teens - to preserve their innocence. But the reality is, if someone has already had that innocence taken in their life, then not writing about it is just brushing it under the rug.

We remember childhood as the fabulous years of our lives, and nations remember their childhood as fabulous years.

Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.

... social environment in childhood affects achieved adult height, life chances, and ultimately mortality rates in adult life. (...) ... social circumstances acting in childhood do have a persisting effect on adult disease rates, in addition to influences acting in adulthood.

A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

I read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.

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.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine years old. Then a classic case of divorce really affected me and I moved back and forth between relatives all the time. And I just became extremely depressed and withdrawn.

Nobody writes if they have had a happy childhood.

I had a stutter 'till... I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.

As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that's just not what happened.

My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities... If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

I attended Sunday School and then church with my father and mother throughout my childhood.

Drop the fear. Fear was taken up by you in your childhood, unconsciously. Now consciously drop it and be mature. Then the life can be a light which goes on deepening as you go on growing.

Ever since childhood I have scorned the commonplace limits so often set upon human ambition. Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone; best both for the body and the mind

I don't want you to think that I'm up late reading a stack of Spider-Man comics and eating a tray of lemon cookies while sucking my thumb. I'm not doing that. But I am loyal to the influences of my childhood.

Parenthood brings profound pleasure and satisfactions--the unparalleled pleasure of caring so intensely for another human being, of watching growth, of reliving childhood, of seeing oneself in a new perspective, and of understanding more about life.

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

My childhood was epitomized by my parents who were uneducated but had a doctorate in love. My dad pressed coats and through my mom and dad I learned about love, family and respecting people. They never went to high school but they had within them every element that makes a great American. They had pride and a great work ethic and they knew how to do things the right way.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

We want the world to focus on children whose lives have been devastated by AIDS. The millions of children who are missing their parents; their childhood, their future but most importantly, they are missing YOU. Everyone can make a real difference. Your voice is needed in a global movement that can change their world.

Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.

We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame upon something outside ourselves. We are always standing up to set right other people, and not ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is a devil's world." We curse others and say, "What infatuated fools!" But why should we be in such a world, if we really are so good? If this is a devil's world, we must be devils also; why else should we be here? "Oh, the people of the world are so selfish!" True enough; but why should we be found in that company, if we be better? Just think of that.

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.

This life is but the childhood of our immortality.

Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood

Childhood is the most beautiful of all life's seasons.

I didn’t play video games because my parents didn’t allow it. That was banned from my childhood experience.

My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.

I never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the practice of accumulation.

Holding onto and manipulating physical objects is one of the things we learn earliest and do the most. It should not be surprising that object control is the basis of one of the five most fundamental metaphors for our inner life. To control objects, we must learn to control our bodies. We learn both forms of control together. Self-control and object control are inseparable experiences from earliest childhood. It is no surprise that we should have as a metaphor-a primary metaphor-Self Control is Object Control.

Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.

In a way, the political cartoon drawings are things that are small and have humor and a childhood aesthetic and are often stronger to spread an opinion.

I had a nice childhood. War and all the experiences affected me as a person and helped me to grow, to change.

I loved 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.' It was such a big part of my childhood.

A child's natural form of behavior is play, and in our aim to educate, play should be honored and preserved for as long past childhood as can be.