Quotes About Childhood

If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances.

We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep inthe memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone –as it seems to me– is in danger.

The 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.

The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?

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.

A sibling is the lens through which you see your childhood.

I like the way corduroys feel. I like the sort of jean aspect of corduroys, but also the texture of them. They probably remind me of my childhood, too, I think. I wore cords, and my dad had a corduroy jacket.

If you watch any John Hughes film of the eighties, that was my childhood experience.

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.

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

Lil Wayne, I ain't mad at him man, he did his thing, he stepped up his lyrical game, he the most improved rapper out of anybody. I've seen him from childhood status to what he's doing right now. He stepped up his rap game, so he deserves the success he had. And no one else was even doing near what he was doing, so I applaud him too.

And during the campaign of 1936, she writes that she and her brother would always rather be out doing things when they're sick, rather than take to their beds. And I think Eleanor Roosevelt always responded to pain by doing more, by doing something, by being active. And I think she just couldn't bear to look at her childhood grief. And she didn't.

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.

But nothing warps time quite like childhood

My mum and dad are pretty amazing chefs and they spent most of my childhood cooking really extravagant things for my sister and me.

Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.

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

Differentiating from parental introjects and psychological defences based on the emotional pain of childhood is essential not only for neurotic or seriously disturbed individuals; it is a central developmental issue in every person’s life.

In fact, my entire childhood consisted of looking at photographs in which the viewer sees the ball behind the line, looking through the goal net, and the poor goalkeeper in front of the net.

I am concerned that my children will grow up sheltered from the public. I am concerned that the children get to experience childhood and youth in their time without constant monitoring. It has been very important for both the Crown Prince and myself.

In a way, you normalize your own childhood to yourself, so I never thought about how much I wrote as a kid. So I was there, confronted with it - so many notebooks, so many tiny plays. Every week we put on a play. We had a big futon, so my sister and I would use the futon as our stage, and I wrote little skits and made her faint because I found it so funny.

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

Play is the royal road to childhood happiness and adult brilliance.

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.

Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.

I know," he said in almost bored contemplation. "My manners suck. I like to chalk it up to a dissatisfying childhood." "I'd chalk it up to that narcissistic personality disorder laces with a smidgen of schizophrenia. Your mother would be proud.

I don’t know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss...

The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death.

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."

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

Those who rhapsodize about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it's like to be 12 years old.

You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.

I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.

My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.

Children make you confront your own childhood. Which I think is common. Suddenly you're remembering your own parents as parents, not to mention the fact that you're confronted by them as grandparents. So you also have that terrible shock, a mirror image of your own. You suddenly seem to be so helpless in the face of young children. And you think, "How did you ever bring up me?"

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.

I remain very much connected to my childhood... I have never been too jaded or too sophisticated.

I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.

Childhood was fairly solitary. I grew up in a very small town called Navan in County Meath. I never knew my father. He left when I was an infant and I was left in the care of my mother and my grandparents.

Everyones childhood plays itself out. No wonder no one knows the other or can completely understand.

Smell can conjure up memories for me stronger than any other sense. Especially childhood memories. Perhaps because you were that much shorter and therefore closer to the ground and its smells.

Your 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?