Quotes About Childhood

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

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 achievement of freedom is hardly possible without the felt mourning. This ability to mourn, i.e, to give up the illusion of a happy childhood, can restore vitality and creativity if a person is able to experience that he was never loved as a child for what he was, but for his achievements, success and good qualities. And that he sacrificed his childhood for this love, this will shake him very deeply.

I think that we are all much closer to our childhood selves than we often think, so when we read about childhood, it can surprise us how immediate or moving it is, when perhaps those feelings are just there, waiting to be accessed all the time.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.

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.

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.

... social environment in childhood affects achieved adult height, life chances, and ultimately mortality rates in adult life. (...) ... social circumstances acting in childhood do have a persisting effect on adult disease rates, in addition to influences acting in adulthood.

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.

Early childhood development has proved to be very beneficial and very cost-effective in societies where this is been tried. So let's not confine ourselves to primary education. Let's think of early childhood development and education as a whole.

A poor child who receives high-quality early childhood development is 40 percent less likely to need special education, twice as likely to attend college and dramatically more likely to survive childhood.

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.

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.

A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

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.

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.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

You never know how things are going to fit. So, you don't count your eggs until they hatch. You can't pre-project that. I mean, this was literally like a childhood fantasy of mine, to be able to work in action. You know, growing up on Disney films like Pocahontas and wanting to enter into that, or Aladdin and how he's fighting - being your own hero, being your own heroine is like every one's dream.

One doesn't know if one had a happy childhood or not. I don't really know what it means.

In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.

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.

I let go of childhood fears. I am a secure, empowered human being.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.

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.

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.

The great success stories of chemotherapy were always in relatively obscure types of cancer. Childhood leukemia constitutes less than two percent of all cancers and many of chemotherapy's other successes were in diseases so rare that many clinicians had never even seen a single case

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land.

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

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.

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.

I always had all of these childhood fantasies about wanting to invent things, like a spaceship or a time machine. And everyone's imagined what it would be like to go back in time and change things, to see what would happen if you had a different life. 'Back to the Future' fulfills all of those daydreams. It's the perfect movie.

Your children get only one childhood.

I've never outgrown my childhood.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

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.

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 feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.

A first class system of early childhood education is the hallmark of a caring and civilized society.

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...

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.

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.

Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.

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

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.