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.

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

My childhood dream was always to be on Broadway. I wanted to end up in TV and film. It's kind of flipped, and I'm not mad about it, but my childhood dream is Broadway and I want to end up there.

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.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age

Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness later on, but it's never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been bathing in this environment during childhood.

I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old 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.

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?

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

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.

So much of what holds us back in life are the long-held resentments stemming from childhood.

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.

My dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America.

Unlike most actors, I did not have a horrible childhood. Most actors have had miserable childhoods and they go into acting to hide from their real life. I had no problem playing in the woods all day. People just sort of left me alone. I think I'm gonna go back to those woods.

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

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

I've been following what's happening in Colombia because it's the country of my childhood.

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

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.

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

Femininity, yes, effectively there is more in The First Man, not only in terms of women but stylistically, in its elements, the notes he wrote. You can see a real love story in it, a childhood love story, [Albert] Camus' first. Meursault [protagonist of The Outsider] and Marie were never up to much really. There is Dora in The Just and others in his plays, but they aren't so well known.

Presently it appears that people are mainly concerned with being well rested. Those capable of uninterrupted sleep are much admired. Unconsciousness is in great demand. This is the day of the milligram. The rigors of learning how to do long division have been a traditional part of childhood, just like learning to smoke. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the two go hand in hand. Any child who cannot do long division by himself does not deserve to smoke.

My childhood was protected by love and a comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.

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?

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

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

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

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.

On the day long after childhood when I suddenly heard of his death, the sky grew dark above my head. I was walking on a Southern highway, and a friend driving in a pony carriage passed me, stopped and said, "Have you heard that Charles Dickens is dead?" It was as if I had been robbed of one of my dearest friends.

I had a hard childhood. Hard for my parents. Not that bad for me.

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.

Childhood is usually identified with fantasy, adventure, and dreaming. But mine didn't offer a lot of hope. I could read my future in my palm. Everything foretold: "You have no future!" A person must be very strong to keep going without hope.

Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.

There 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 one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.

We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame upon something outside ourselves. We are always standing up to set right other people, and not ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is a devil's world." We curse others and say, "What infatuated fools!" But why should we be in such a world, if we really are so good? If this is a devil's world, we must be devils also; why else should we be here? "Oh, the people of the world are so selfish!" True enough; but why should we be found in that company, if we be better? Just think of that.

My earliest childhood memory is of my father going crazy when the Giants won the World Series in 1954. He started whoopin' and hollerin' and jumpin' up and down all around the living room. I started crying because he scared me to death.

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.

Today, the United States is No. 1 in corporate profits, No. 1 in CEO salaries, No. 1 in childhood poverty and No. 1 in income and wealth inequality in the industrialized world.

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.

My childhood years were a balance of dark and light.

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

I 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 — I’ve often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did I’d 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? — What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?

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.

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.