Quotes About Childhood

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

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

The magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood — the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don't see.

But when I realized it was actually going to be this portrait of the artist, birth to death, I had to then discover who Margaret as a young woman would be. I had to find the different voices for her throughout her life. I had a lot of fun discovering that. I had a lot of fun writing the childhood sections. By imagining her childhood, I was able to come up with this voice that matures as she gets older.

I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.

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

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.

My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity.

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

If the goal is to dramatically improve college completion rates, not college-going rates by itself but college completion, it's not just a college problem. We need a big focus on early childhood education. Our early childhood education system is pretty good in this country. Not enough students have opportunity. And, very discouragingly, they lose their advantage because they go to poor schools after that. So, let's focus on our babies.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

I had a serious childhood illness - sort of like spinal meningitis - that led to a three-month hospitalization. Afterward, I couldn't be insured because of a pre-existing condition.

I am much more powerful today than the old programs and mind viruses that I absorbed in my childhood.

Sisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other's chosen and most happy companions. In addition to their shared memories of childhood and of their relationship to each other's children, they share memories of the same home, the same homemaking style, and the same small prejudices about housekeeping that carry the echoes of their mother's voice.

You have to keep being curious. The notion that the present is different than the past, and the future will be different than the present, and the present is past, as we say it. I think I, by nature, am an optimist. Maybe I was driven to escape from my childhood and to be something, create my own world or career the way I wanted it to be. And I keep doing that in very interesting ways.

It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.

Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.

I don't have any friends from my childhood because I didn't stay at one school for very long.

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.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.

Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.

Down in the bottom of my childhood my father stands laughing.

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.

The most wonderful thing in life is to do something for a child because they're children for such a short time. We can't allow ourselves to let them live a miserable childhood.

Childhood is not a race to see how quickly a child can read, write and count. It is a small window of time to learn and develop at the pace that is right for each individual child. Earlier is not better.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.

Let's say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it's able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they're the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is "proof" that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft.

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.

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

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?

The ridiculousness and idiocy of life is embraced and examined. It nurtures the childhood perspective in everyone.

I had a really nice childhood; I had great parents. I earned my allowance by washing dishes, and in the summer I earned my allowance by working in daddy's garden.

I've never outgrown my childhood.

How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.

Let positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Excessive competitiveness, anxiety, hostility, suspiciousness, all originate in the nursery years. That is why, if we want a world of peace and not violence, love and not hate, cooperation and not murder, justice and not selfishness, we have to learn how to make childhood more happy. No nobler task could be pursued by our generation.

I thought acting was what grownups did. It was such a part of my childhood. I was already in love with performing before I knew there were other options. By then, it was too late.

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

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

I dont remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

It's strange, because I remember the biggest point of my childhood was one Halloween when I was trick or treating and ended up at Henry Winkler's house and he answered the door. So I got to meet The Fonz. That was cool.

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.

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.

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