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.

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?

The unsparing savagery of stories like “The Robber Bridegroom” is a sharp reminder that fairy tales belong to the childhood of culture as much as to the culture of childhood... They capture anxieties and fantasies that have deep roots in childhood experience.

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

Childhood hunger in America is as much a paradox as it is a tragedy. Why, in the wealthiest country in the world, should hunger darken the lives and dreams of 12 million children and their families? I believe that, when Americans learn the facts and understand how their involvement can make a difference, banishing childhood hunger will be a national, local and personal priority.

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.

Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a childs soul.”• “Play is the highest level of child development . . . It gives . . . joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world . . . The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life.”• “Children are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers.

You're the hero of your own story. I had let go of my own story from my own childhood and whatever anger I had and I began to see it from a very different place. It's really easy to be like "This thing happened to me! Look what they did to me or are doing to me." These are such powerful ideas and it's so easy to hold onto them forever. When I let go of those ideas it was easier to see my childhood from different points of view.

It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today's children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.

The children's writer not only makes a satisfactory connection between [the writer's] present maturity and his past childhood, he also does the same for his child-characters in reverse - makes the connection between their present childhood and their future maturity. That their maturity is never visibly achieved makes no difference; the promise of it is there.

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.

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the Civil War, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s.

One thing that people keep on saying to me is that the wealth and the fame must have made up for missing out on my childhood. But the idea of money - putting a price on your childhood - is ridiculous. You will never get those years back and you can't put a price on them.

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're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?

I grew up loving cars. It was completely and utterly, without a doubt, my childhood dream. Whether your childhood dream progresses or changes, you turn into a man and you probably shouldn't still have that same dream.

(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.

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.

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.

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.

The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.

I have two kids now and through watching them, I keep having flashbacks to my own childhood.

My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

I was raised in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school, and my childhood brain perceived medieval Catholicism as an action movie: There's this crazy omnipresent guy who can destroy you at any moment.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.

Childhood has it's own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.

Oh, be assured, fellow teachers, that there is no time in life so favorable to sound conversion as early childhood.

It's never too late to change the programming imprinted in childhood, carried in our genes or derived from previous lives; the solution is mindfulness in the present moment.

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.

Childhood is over when you know you’re gonna die.

Drop the fear. Fear was taken up by you in your childhood, unconsciously. Now consciously drop it and be mature. Then the life can be a light which goes on deepening as you go on growing.

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.

I 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.

Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood.

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

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

I was born in 1953, in Paris. But soon after my birth my family (I have one sister) moved into a rent apartment in suburbs of Paris named Romainville. That time my parents were freshly married and it was extremely hard to find an apartment in Paris for a young married couple. To say they found a flat in a blocks of houses which was built after the second World War - and this is the place where I spent my childhood.

I have great childhood memories cow-tipping, going off and getting lost in the bog for hours, and coming home covered in dirt.

One strain could call up the quivering expectancy of Christmas Eve, childhood, joy and sadness, the lonely wonder of a star

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.