Quotes About Childhood

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.

The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation.....There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.

They say your childhood influences your tastes and interests, or your approach if you're an artist. So what you create, whatever you saw, whatever your childhood was like - it influences how you're going to end up.

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 think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.

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.

The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.

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.

(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.

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.

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.

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

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

When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.

I'm slightly pessimistic about human nature, about how close it's possible to bond with those around you. Dying alone is a deep fear for most people. I'm not scared of death but I'm scared of dying scared. Maybe everything else in life comes from those two points: the separation anxiety of childhood and the ultimate fear of dying alone.

Sisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other's chosen and most happy companions. In addition to their shared memories of childhood and of their relationship to each other's children, they share memories of the same home, the same homemaking style, and the same small prejudices about housekeeping that carry the echoes of their mother's voice.

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

I have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories . . One knows what stories can do, how they can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds. . . .One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires.

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 realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

The structures of neoliberal modernity do more than disinvest in young people and commodify them, they also transform the protected space of childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty, especially for those young people further marginalized by race and class who now inhabit a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged as flawed consumers or pathologized others.

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

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

I had a stutter 'till... I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.

When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be.

Hollywood parties not only confuse me, but they often disillusion me. The disillusion comes when I meet a movie star I’ve been admiring since childhood. I always thought that movie stars were exciting and talented people full of special personality. Meeting one of them at a party I discover usually that he (or she) is colorless and even frightened. I’ve often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people.

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.

My first memoir, 'Home,' was about my childhood, early training and formative years in the Theater, i am so pleased that my good friends at the Hachette Book Group have encouraged me to share the next phase of my life, beginning with my arrival in Hollywood and the wonderful movies and television programs I was asked to be a part of.

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

The most wonderful thing in life is to do something for a child because they're children for such a short time. We can't allow ourselves to let them live a miserable 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.

Since childhood I’d been suspected of imagination

I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.

Childhood reading is so important.

The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.

Excessive competitiveness, anxiety, hostility, suspiciousness, all originate in the nursery years. That is why, if we want a world of peace and not violence, love and not hate, cooperation and not murder, justice and not selfishness, we have to learn how to make childhood more happy. No nobler task could be pursued by our generation.

I 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.

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.

I don't miss much about my childhood. I lived in a good neighborhood, a wacky neighborhood. It was a very boy-heavy neighborhood - kind of Lord of the Flies-y. So many weird things happened, funny things.

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.

I 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.

With childhood comes a brief grace period of ignorant bliss -- when you're not aware of the pain around you. That is the most special, truly unique time. It is the core of adult lament.

I do think it's good to remember that childish things are made for children, and that, however pleasantly lurid the promise of a return to the clarity of childhood may be, an infatuation with the childish reveals only that one has failed to grow past it.

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?"

The wild, the absurd, the seemingly crazy: this kind of thinking is where new ideas come from ... The people capable of such playful thought carry forward their childish qualities and childhood dreams, applying them in areas where most of us get stuck, victims of our adult seriousness. Staying a child isn't easy.

I never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the practice of accumulation.