Quotes About Childhood

While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

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.

I wasn't ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, "I'm so glad that's over. Nothing can ever be as bad again," without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.

In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my OWN childhood vividly; I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let the adults *know* I knew... it would scare them.

The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation.....There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.

Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.

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

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called - appropriately enough - Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.

The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.

My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.

The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me. Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of forming--ay, of forming and forgetting.

(Talks about her childhood) I grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Reading, PA. It was the most magical fun childhood. We had grape arbours and we would make jam with my mom. My dad would go to work and he'd come home. He'd clean out stalls and fix split-row fences.

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.

The songs from your childhood, when you hear them you get chills all over.

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

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.

I have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories . . One knows what stories can do, how they can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds. . . .One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires.

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I think back to when I was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s, during the [John] McCarthy era, with two parents who founded a Unitarian Church. We lived in a little frame house, and my bedroom was just down the hall from the kitchen. My favorite memories of childhood are of the smell of coffee wafting into my bedroom as my parents and their friends talked about the big, important things - about racism and about how to move our country to live its values.

We like the idea of childhood but are not always crazy about the kids we know. We like it, that is, when we are imagining our ownchildhoods. So part of our apparent appreciation of youth is simply envy.

Apprenticeship is one of the dearest roles of childhood, not just watching Dad or Mother, but being taught a hands-on trade.

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.

The dreams of childhood - it's airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown.

O naked flower of my lips, you lie! I await a thing unknown or perhaps, unaware of the mystery and your cries you give, O lips, the supreme tortured moans of a childhood groping among its reveries to sort out finally its cold precious stones.

I remember seeing war hero Jimmy Doolittle fly a Gee Bee racer there. He was my childhood hero. Many years later, I was lucky enough to go hunting with him.

Memories of your childhood come back and are so clear and vivid it's like being young again. Colours seem brighter and more brilliant. Laughter seems part of daily life where before it was infrequent or didn't exist at all. A phone call or two during the day helps to get you through a long day's work and always brings a smile to your face.

I didn't have a blueprint from my childhood that I could call on, which is an enormous deficit when you're trying to put together a family life. I didn't see a family life where men were thriving inside of it. You know, my dad tended to blame the family for his inability to achieve what he wanted to achieve, you know? So, unfortunately, I was coming from that particular frame of mind.

Back to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.

I'm pretty squeaky clean. No big tragedies in my childhood or adolescence or adulthood. I've had a very easygoing, simple life.

I grew up with probably three different authors having a seminal influence on my childhood, Dr. Seuss being one and Maurice Sendak being another. That was my parents, who exposed me to their stories. That's how I was introduced to the whole idea of not just reading, but storytelling in general.

In fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did. A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things," their totems.

My childhood years were a balance of dark and light.

For both Adam Smith and Karl Marx the essential work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, was "just women's work" - and in their minds not even classified as "productive work."

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

My experience in childhood and adolescence of the subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by men had convinced me that I was not cut out to be a wife.

For there is no bond more lasting than that formed by the mutual confidences of that magic time when youth is slipping from the sheath of childhood and beginning to wonder what lies for it beyond those misty hills that bound the golden road.

Sisters share the scent and smells... the feel of a common childhood.

I didn't have a good childhood because I never could get along with other kids. I was the child that sat in the corner eating lunch by herself.

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.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.