Popular quotes about Childhood! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 9
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.
Josephine HartIf there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.
Gaston BachelardI 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.
Edward HirschYou'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.
Baron VaughnThe role you've been ascribed in childhood can twist or break apart or seem outgrown, especially when you have your own family and begin to see your own childhood from a different angle. You remember. You reassess. I think that was the kernel of the novel for me. This idea that you change but that your family, the people you were born into, might find that change hard to accept. You no longer fit the mold you've always been ascribed. When the adult children in the book converge back on their small family home there's a sense that they don't fit there anymore.
Maggie O'FarrellIf the goal is to dramatically improve college completion rates, not college-going rates by itself but college completion, it's not just a college problem. We need a big focus on early childhood education. Our early childhood education system is pretty good in this country. Not enough students have opportunity. And, very discouragingly, they lose their advantage because they go to poor schools after that. So, let's focus on our babies.
Arne DuncanI am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.
Edna O'BrienSuperhero stories are kind of in my DNA from childhood on, so I think I'm genetically drawn to playing in the genre when the opportunity presents itself.
J. Michael StraczynskiVaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.
Ezekiel EmanuelI 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.
Nicholas BrendonWhen 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.
Gever TulleyThese 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.
Peter StraubHollywood parties not only confuse me, but they often disillusion me. The disillusion comes when I meet a movie star Iโve 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. Iโve often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people.
Marilyn MonroeThe 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.
Juan GabrielI try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. Theyโre pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isnโt a wound being excavated from childhood.
Sarah RuhlBecause 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.
Paul BowlesIn the Mediterranean of my childhood, there were no large groupers, sharks, or whales. All I saw was seaweed and a few fish, smaller than my little diving mask. All the large animals were gone, simply because we had eaten them.
Enric SalaFrom 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.
Graham GreeneWe want the world to focus on children whose lives have been devastated by AIDS. The millions of children who are missing their parents; their childhood, their future but most importantly, they are missing YOU. Everyone can make a real difference. Your voice is needed in a global movement that can change their world.
Pierce BrosnanI wanted to deconstruct the puppet show. I wanted to turn it inside out and do stuff that you're not supposed to do. I didn't want it to be gentle like most puppet shows tend to be, since they come from childhood where you're gently trying to tell a story. I wanted to blast all that out of the water. I think there's plenty of room of any kind of attitude toward puppets. I call puppeteering acting while hiding.
Wayne WhiteLet positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.
Swami VivekanandaSuccess is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
Nassim Nicholas TalebMom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
Ethel WatersChildhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
Jonathan KozolI 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.
Bruce SpringsteenA first class system of early childhood education is the hallmark of a caring and civilized society.
Andy HargreavesI 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.
Katherine WaterstonWe 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.
Edward James OlmosIt's the continuation of everyone's childhood to see these young children who grow up full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder. And within an instant they're gone from this world. It's terrible.
Lucien BouchardI 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.
Lauren FaustI didn't have a good childhood because I never could get along with other kids. I was the child that sat in the corner eating lunch by herself.
Jolene BlalockThere had been no more attacks since those on Justin and Nearly Headless Nick, and Madam Pomfrey was pleased to report that the Mandrakes were becoming moody and secretive, meaning that they were fast leaving childhood.
J. K. RowlingChoices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Loren EiseleyIf we don't somehow stem the tide of childhood obesity, we're going to have a huge problem.
Lance ArmstrongIt's essential that a part of you not grow up. Childhood wonder gives us our spark and beauty.
Robin QuiversI make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.
Larry McMurtryThat was in 1994, July, 1994, and I can remember that like it was yesterday too because it was the culmination of a childhood dream to finally be laying on the launch pad inside a space shuttle and getting ready to be launched into space. The impression of going into a space shuttle is that it looks like a brand new simulator. We spend so many hours inside a simulator that everything is very familiar. Every switch, the seats, the way things work, but the vehicle, the actual spacecraft looks brand new because it hasn't been used nearly as much as the simulators.
Leroy ChiaoMy childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.
Poppy Z. BriteAll patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey.
Marilyn FrenchReligion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
Irvin D. YalomBut really, what else are you going to talk about in line at the liquor store? Childhood trauma seems like the natural choice, since itโs the reason why most of us are in line there to begin with.
Jenny Lawson