Quotes About Childhood

They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

You may forget your childhood, but your childhood does not forget you.

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

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.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

I think it shapes it in very deep ways that you don't entirely understand. Rainer Maria Rilke said there are two inexhaustible sources for poetry. One is dreams, and the other is childhood. I think childhood is an inexhaustible source of your becoming who you will be and certain deep feelings are set inside of you.

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

I don't think if you asked any of my childhood friends they would say that I had a weird childhood; they might say there weren't a lot of regular rules, the conversations in the house were always very open, dreams were a great thing to talk about, everybody was making something all the time.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

As we try to change, we will discover within us a fierce struggle between our loyalty to that battle-scarred victim of his own childhood, our father, and the father we want to be. We must meet our childhood father at close range: get to know him, learn to forgive him, and somehow, go beyond him.

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

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.

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

I was named after Yul Brynner because my mother had an infatuation with him. Who the hell names a Cuban kid Yul? Talk about a torturous childhood.

I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.

If I am told my loving you had to happen because of some Freudian stuff about my childhood, that might be degrading or deflationary, but if I am told it had to happen because you are such a wonderful person that I couldn't possibly resist your charms, or because we are so incredibly compatible, then necessity seems very romantic.

You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

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.

The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.

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.

I don't particularly like to go see 3D movies, but when I'm doing it I kind of do enjoy it. I enjoy seeing the image in 3D, there's a childhood fun about being able to see those dimensions.

Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.

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.

All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.

Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.

I had a very normal childhood, and my mother cooked very normal food.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

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.

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

I feel things can always be funny, but that's probably because I have some kind of leftover childhood need to make people laugh. For somebody like me, that's the thing you excel at.

We are not at the mercy of events that transpired in our childhood unless we believe we are.

All of us have that feeling of some deficiency from our childhood. I think that's a universal thing.

I like to be challenged and stay true to my archetype. That's something I don't admit of being like in real life and I don't have to be. I always try to understand what would lead an individual to being that way, to being oblivious to the fact that he's somewhat insensitive and scared of commitment, and that psychological journey, and what traumas may have occurred in this person's childhood to bring him to that point.

Well, I took ballet for many, many years, so my whole childhood really revolved around dance class. I grew up around dance; my mother was a dancer.

My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor.

At key crossroads in his life, Vernon Davis has continued to make a conscious choice to grow as a person and player. His determination through adversity since his childhood days is commendable.

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.

Around me the moonlight glittered on the pebbles of the llano, and in the night sky a million stars sparkled. Across the river I could see the twinkling lights of the town. In a week I would be returning to school, and as always I would be running up the goat path and crossing the bridge to go to church. Sometime in the future I would have to build my own dream out of those things that were so much a part of my childhood.

It's the continuation of everyone's childhood to see these young children who grow up full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder. And within an instant they're gone from this world. It's terrible.

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

Chocolate is the first luxury. It has so many things wrapped up in it: Deliciusness in the moment, childhood memories, and that grin-inducing feeling of getting a reward for being good.

Playing our parts. Yes, we all have to do that and from childhood on, I have found that my own character has been much harder to play worthily and far harder at times to comprehend than any of the roles I have portrayed.

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.