Popular quotes about Childhood! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 3
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.
Frank McCourtI 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.
Gloria SteinemEvery man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.
Giacomo LeopardiI 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.
Edward HirschIn childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.
Richard DawkinsI don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.
Fernando Pessoa... 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.
Michael MarmotWe each deal with childhood in different ways. That brothers and sisters can take the same lump of clay that is childhood and use it to shape themselves into unique human beings is a miracle in itself. Despite individual struggles, triumphs, joys and disappointments, someone is made of the same stuff and has been at your side, whether figuratively or literally, from the beginning. Use our brother and sister quote collection to explore this truth and gain compassionate understanding for yourself and your siblings.
Laura RamirezChildhood 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.
Edna St. Vincent MillayThe really intelligent person keeps his childhood alive to his last breath.He never loses it-the wonder the child feels looking at the birds,looking at the flowers,looking at the sky...Intelligence also has to be,in the same way,childlike.
RajneeshYou never know how things are going to fit. So, you don't count your eggs until they hatch. You can't pre-project that. I mean, this was literally like a childhood fantasy of mine, to be able to work in action. You know, growing up on Disney films like Pocahontas and wanting to enter into that, or Aladdin and how he's fighting - being your own hero, being your own heroine is like every one's dream.
Jena MaloneThe 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.
Alice MillerLove 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.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowShadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.
Joseph CornellThe happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.
Andre Leon TalleyThings that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It's less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.
Tim BurtonI hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.
Jeffrey EugenidesNot childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.
Charles LambI 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.
Nicolas CageEveryone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood.
Tayeb SalihI was brought up on choirs and brass bands. They formed the music of my childhood. When I heard the Treorchy Male Choir at the Royal Variety Performance it brought back such happy memories. You have your own eminent place in the history of British music. You stand for excellence in a great tradition and your work for charity is both an example and an inspiration.
Michael ParkinsonLet positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.
Swami VivekanandaThere was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on oneโs feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.
Lorrie MooreI 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.
Katherine WaterstonBack to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.
Jimmy BuffettListen, everything I did in my childhood was competitive. Everything we did my dad made it into a game to win. We used to drive my mum nuts.
Lee WestwoodThroughout life, from childhood, from school until we die, we are taught to compare ourselves with another; yet when I compare myself with another I am destroying myself.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiI 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.
Christopher MeledandriI just went through my childhood attic with my sister. I'm not an expert, and I don't mean to put myself in that category, but thinking about Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000 hours, I was like, Here are my 10,000 hours!
Zoe KazanI'm not the most sophisticated person. I'm not the smartest person in the world. But, I know what makes me excited about life, from Spielberg movies to Michael Jackson music videos to cartoons on Saturday mornings, which made my childhood.
Jon M. ChuI found that married life gave me the necessary freedom to follow an ambition which had been with me since childhood; and so I started to write in earnest.
Jean PlaidyI felt the sensation of each of the directions I mentally and emotionally turned into amazed at all the possible directions you can take with different motives that come in like it can make you a different person โ Iโve often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did Iโd turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my whole life in the end? โ Whatโs in store for me in the direction I donโt take?
Jack KerouacCritics 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.
C. S. LewisAnd what we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization.
Terence McKennaMy study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, for all the science and sport involved in it.
Vasily SmyslovA central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.
Bell HooksAs ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.
Sally MannYour first duty is to be humane. Love childhood. Look with friendly eyes on its games, its pleasures, its amiable dispositions. Which of you does not sometimes look back regretfully on the age when laughter was ever on the lips and the heart free of care? Why steal from the little innocents the enjoyment of a time that passes all too quickly?
Jean-Jacques RousseauBut really, what else are you going to talk about in line at the liquor store? Childhood trauma seems like the natural choice, since itโs the reason why most of us are in line there to begin with.
Jenny LawsonCreativity consists in maintaining a key aspect of the experience of childhood throughout one's life: the capacity to create and recreate the world. Creativity is the omnipotence of the child's mind.
Donald Woods WinnicottI would come, many years later, to understand why To Kill A Mockingbird is considered an important novel, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieThat beautiful sister of mine was an overwhelming and volatile mixture. One had the feeling that she'd been shot from a canon and showered her sparks over an incredulous world with no thought or care where they fell, a carbon copy of father. She was like some silvery comet who streaked through life with daring speed, the wellspring of which was an inner confidence that I deeply admired. At times, particularly in childhood, I was intimidated by her but she dictated from an aura of affection for me that was never threatening.
Joan Bennett