428 Childhood Quotes

Who ran to help me when I fell, And would some pretty story tell, Or kiss the place to make it well? My mother.

I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.

I watched them from the window, thy children at their play, And I thought of all my own dear friends, who were far, oh, far away, And childish loves, and childish cares, and a child's own buoyant gladness Came gushing back again to me with a soft and solemn sadness; And feelings frozen up full long, and thoughts of long ago, Seemed to be thawing at my heart with a warm and sudden flow.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

My earliest memory is of feeling different. My parents told me that I wasn't like other children.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was. My ambition from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip.

A baby is born into this world in a state of fear. Total paranoia and awareness. He sees the world with eyes not used yet. As he grows up, his parents lay all this stuff on him. They tell him, when they should be letting him tell them. Let the children lead you.

I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening, I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn't for me.

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

Children do not really need money. After all, they don't have to pay rent or send mailgrams.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.

Toys are not a need people typically think of, but they've got all these kids who have absolutely nothing to do.

I spent my childhood alone, overweight and ugly, angry at everything, and knowing nothing of a life beyond this sadness.

Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

Like the East Side tenement, our house was seldom without the sound of music or laughter or questions being asked or stories being told.

Why were the little girls all frightened To be just what they are The boys were told to ask themselves How high how far The girls were told to reach the shelves While the boys were reaching stars That's why little girls were frightened To be just what they are.

I doubt whether the world holds for any one a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice-cream.

Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold.

Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.

I wanted to be a visual artist because I grew up around a lot of painters and photographers and had a very artistic upbringing. And I fantasized about being a drug-dealer when I was a kid. I thought it would be a good opportunity; I knew that the market would be strong. Is that bizarre?

I was very much in my own world, never the popular kid. But I had a great family, a great brother and mother.

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six.

Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle.

Infancy, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, 'Heaven lies about us.' The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forbearance among men.

In those early amorphous years of life, when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and everything was Forever ...'

It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. He didn't call his Father and Mother 'Father' and 'Mother', but Harold and Alberta. They [his family] were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and tee-totallers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open. (ch. 1)

I've heard that story about kids are high naturally, but I've seen kids that aren't high, kids who've had the high taken out of them.

I hope these babies have a world to live in. I hope they have a place to go, a land to walk on. I remember when I was ten years old, in Washington, D.C., and I lived with fear of the atom bomb that would keep me awake nights and make me wake up screaming. I used to babysit for my younger brother and sister and I'd be terrified if I heard a siren, a police car, or an ambulance. I'd say, 'My God, what if this is it! How do I protect them?' We used to have duck-and-cover exercises in school, where they'd ring a bell at any time of the day, sometimes five or six times a day, and we'd crawl under our desks and put our hands like this to protect the back of our necks from the bomb. We all carried that with us.

'Susan, I saw you in the classroom today, as the sun came from behind the clouds, a burst of brilliant light caught your hair, it was haloed in front of me. You turned, your eyes flashed fire into my soul, I immediately read the words of Dostoevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, I fancy you!' But no, at 13 you're just going, ''Ello Sue: I've got legs. D'ya like: bread? I've got a French loaf. [mimes smacking someone with the loaf and dashing off] Byeee! [high voice] I love you!'

'So look I did this yesterday, I spin a twig and it makes smoke and it makes orange and yellow stuff, and its kinda warm. I'm going to be famous, Sheila!' 'You're not either, come and have your salad.' 'I'm going to! invent this, and:' 'Jeff Fire!, You are not going to be famous!' 'I am Sheila! And you know what? I'm going to call it Jeff!

What is patriotism? Is it love of one's birthplace, the place of childhood's recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivete, we would watch the passing clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not float so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one 'an eye should be,' piercing the very depths of our little souls?

When I was a kid my parents used to tell me, 'Emo, don't go near the cellar door!' One day when they were away, I went to the door and opened it... and I saw birds and trees...

When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, doesn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me!

Ce qui fait le poete, n'est-ce pas l'amour, la recherche desesperee du moindre rayon de soleil d'autrefois jouant sur le parquet d'une chambre d'enfant?

'Leib bin ich und Seele'-so redet das Kind. Und warum sollte man nicht wie die Kinder reden?

Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the skies as I came through.

After a few days, Willie got tired of [the water-wheel] - and no blame to him, for it was no earthly use beyond amusement, and that which can only amuse can never amuse long. I think the reason children get tired of their toys so soon is just that it is against human nature to be really interested in what is of no use. If you say that a beautiful thing is always interesting, I answer, that a beautiful thing is of the highest use. Is not the diamond that flashes all its colours into the heart of a poet as useful as the diamond with which the glazier divides the sheets of glass into panes for our windows?

Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him! - just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody; for his mother had no money to buy books to set him wrong on the subject.

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

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

Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood-for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

I started smoking as soon as I went on the stage. I'd make cigars out of the Morning World when I was a kid.

My mother treated us all equally ... with contempt.

What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way to the coffin.

Child! Do not throw this book about; Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.

Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant - if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the lightbulbs.

When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pretended to be something else. This is one of their best tricks.

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, 'Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!' This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

'There ought to be one fairy for every boy and girl.' 'Ought to be? Isn't there?' 'No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don't believe in fairies, and every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.'

Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees. 'Do you believe?' he cried.

Michael believed longer than the other boys, though they jeered at him; so he was with Wendy when Peter came for her at the end of the first year. She flew away with Peter in the frock she had woven from leaves and berries in the Neverland, and her one fear was that he might notice how short it had become; but he never noticed, he had so much to say about himself. She had looked forward to thrilling talks with him about old times, but new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind.

'Why can't you fly now, mother?' 'Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way.' 'Why do they forget the way?' 'Because they are no longer gay and innocent and heartless. It is only the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly.'

As you look at Wendy, you may see her hair becoming white, and her figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself, to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

I was five years old the first time I got drunk.

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel, in some degree, as you do; who have not, at least, been given a taste for Nature in early life. They lose a great deal.

It's not that age brings childhood back again, age merely shows what children we remain.

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?

Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them - certain traits, certain places where you don't let the world go. (2004)

Innocence and purity are definitely themes that I've plodded about in over the years. They're themes I'm fascinated with, because for me, growing up in America in the '50s and just into the '60s, there was still some kind of innocence. There was hope. (2004)

I grew up in a very different kind of family environment although I didn't know I was living a weird kind of existence until I would go to other kids' homes and see how they lived. I also felt very alienated and isolated in school and some kids and one particular teacher would love to pick on me. So that made me pretty defensive and angry in some ways and you want to do anything to escape that kind of aggression you're experiencing. (2004)

When I was a kid, I was just like any other boy. Boys are very curious, they like to push the walls, you know? (1988)

I was 15, I think, [when my parents divorced]. It had been coming for quite a long time. I'm surprised they lasted that long, bless their hearts. I think they tried to keep it together for the kids, and then they couldn't anymore. (2004)

[My childhood] was strange, though then again, it was normal to us. It wasn't until I started going to other kids' houses and hanging out, having dinner, seeing what a family is supposed to do that I saw that we weren't normal. (2004)

At my house dinner easily could have consisted of a bologna sandwich, and then you'd split. You might come back later and grab a few peanuts, and then you'd split again. That was it. I would go to my buddy Sal's house for dinner. I couldn't understand what was going on with everyone sitting down together. I'll never forget seeing romaine lettuce for the first time. I thought it was weird - I was afraid of it. There was salad and appetizers and soup. I had no idea about that. I grew up on hillbilly food. (2004)

We lived in a small house, and nobody argued in a whisper. We were exposed to [my parents'] violent outbursts against each other. That stuff sticks. (2004)

There are certain elements of boyhood we can't escape. And farts will always be funny. (2004)

was 12 when my mom bought me a $25 electric guitar. I had an uncle who was a preacher, and his family had a gospel singing group. He played guitar in church, and I used to watch him. I became obsessed with the guitar. I locked myself in my bedroom for the better part of a year and taught myself chords. I'd try to learn things off records. (2004)

My brother] turned me on to Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. I remember listening to the soundtracks to A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris. I loved Aerosmith, Kiss and Alice Cooper, and when I was older the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. (2004)

Ohh yeah.. I play with Barbies all the time.

A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.

I can remember walking as a child. It was not customary to say you were fatigued. It was customary to complete the goal of the expedition.