Quotes About Childhood

As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.

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.

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.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

there are - as every one knows - two kinds of writing: one coming out of your vitals and the other from the top of your head. The first is the only sort from which any true private pleasure can be gained, for it is a way of getting something out of life which seemed to be there in childhood, when childhood is quite over.

There are those uncomfortable things that've passed that you have to deal with or they define you, like childhood trauma. Like when I'm lost, I just feel like somewhere along the line, if you've gone through any childhood trauma, it makes you lose your essence and it takes a while to get that back. There are certain things about that that push my buttons.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

Exploration of the natural world begins in early childhood, flourishes in middle childhood, and continues in adolescence as a pleasure and a source of strength for social action.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

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.

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

There are vivid memories from my childhood-what we had to go through because of low wages and the conditions, basically because there was no union. I suppose if I wanted to be fair I could say that I'm trying to settle a personal score. I could dramatize it by saying that I want to bring social justice to farm workers. But the truth is that I went through a lot of hell, and a lot of people did. If we can even the score a little for the workers then we are doing something. Besides, I don't know any other work I like to do better than this. I really don't.

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

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.

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.

I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.

A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.

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.

In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been--it may even be greater--for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.

I think back to when I was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s, during the [John] McCarthy era, with two parents who founded a Unitarian Church. We lived in a little frame house, and my bedroom was just down the hall from the kitchen. My favorite memories of childhood are of the smell of coffee wafting into my bedroom as my parents and their friends talked about the big, important things - about racism and about how to move our country to live its values.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand?Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

We like the idea of childhood but are not always crazy about the kids we know. We like it, that is, when we are imagining our ownchildhoods. So part of our apparent appreciation of youth is simply envy.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

You can only be a good father in relationship to your childhood.

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.

I didn't have a blueprint from my childhood that I could call on, which is an enormous deficit when you're trying to put together a family life. I didn't see a family life where men were thriving inside of it. You know, my dad tended to blame the family for his inability to achieve what he wanted to achieve, you know? So, unfortunately, I was coming from that particular frame of mind.

Childhood, whose very happiness is love.

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.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

We must come to terms with our responsibility to be the gatekeepers to end childhood hunger. Our love for life can propel us to share and provide a secure future for the children of our country.

I'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.

I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.

At key crossroads in his life, Vernon Davis has continued to make a conscious choice to grow as a person and player. His determination through adversity since his childhood days is commendable.

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 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?

I spent my entire childhood feeling like a freak because I liked to read. It's just like, "Eh, no one else likes to read but me; I must be crazy!"

My childhood was never great. We moved from place to place a lot. There were times when we had no definite place to stay. So, a basic level of security was not always there. Therefore, when you finally make it out, and you become who I am, you're humbled by the memories of those situations.

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

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?"

Childhood trauma is not necessarily a prophecy of doom, because some children are resilient or because later experiences help to restore mental health.

Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.