Childhood Quotes

“But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“My parents are going to kill me!"
"That seems rather harsh...”
― Garth Nix, Sir Thursday

“Nonsense. Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older, and then before you know it, they're grown.”
― J.M. Barrie

“When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you”
― Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

“I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”
― David Almond, Jackdaw Summer

“People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case "head drive" that starts the corruption of the files.”
― Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

“It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?...

It's a neighborly day in this beauty wood,
A neighborly day for a beauty.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?...

I've always wanted to have a neighbor just like you.
I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.

So, let's make the most of this beautiful day.
Since we're together we might as well say:
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won't you be my neighbor?

Won't you please,
Won't you please?
Please won't you be my neighbor?”
― Fred Rogers

“I love the stillness of the wood;
I love the music of the rill:
I love the couch in pensive mood
Upon some silent hill.

Scarce heard, beneath yon arching trees,
The silver-crested ripples pass;
and, like a mimic brook, the breeze
Whispers among the grass.

Here from the world I win release,
Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude,
Break into mar the holy peace
Of this great solitude.

Here may the silent tears I weep
Lull the vested spirit into rest,
As infants sob themselves to sleep
Upon a mothers breast.

But when the bitter hour is gone,
And the keen throbbing pangs are still,
Oh, sweetest then to couch alone
Upon some silent hill!

To live in joys that once have been,
To put the cold world out of sight,
And deck life's drear and barren scene
With hues of rainbow-light.

For what to man the gift of breath,
If sorrow be his lot below;
If all the day that ends in death
Be dark with clouds of woe?

Shall the poor transport of an hour
Repay long years of sore distress—
The fragrance of a lonely flower
Make glad the wilderness?

Ye golden house of life's young spring,
Of innocence, of love and truth!
Bright, beyond all imagining,
Thou fairy-dream of youth!

I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer's day.”
― Lewis Carroll

“The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is
like a yellow hole. . .”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.”
― Bryan White

“No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.”
― Federico Fellini

“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
― John Berger

“Some details in life may look insignificant but appear to be vital leitmotifs in a person's life. They may have the value of "Rosebuds" of Citizen Kane or "Madeleine cookies" of Marcel Proust or "Strawberry fields" of the Beatles. People regularly walk down the memory lane of their early youth. The paper boats of their childhood are recurrently floating on the waves of their mind and bring back the mood and the spirit of the early days. They enable us to retreat from the trivial, daily worries and can generate delightful bliss and true joy in a sometimes frantic and chaotic life. ("Paper boats forever" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked.”
― J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.”
― L.S. Vygotsky

“See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.”
― Robert R. McCammon, Boy's Life

“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.”
― Margaret Wise Brown

“I want to be in fifth grade again. Now, that is a deep dark secret, almost as big as the other one. Fifth grade was easy -- old enough to play outside without Mom, too young to go off the block. The perfect leash length.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.”
― Henning Mankell, When the Snow Fell

“. . .from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk

“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.”
― Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season

“Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone...”
― Asa Don Brown, The Effects of Childhood Trauma on Adult Perception and Worldview

“Tuesday, November 17th. 1896

...

I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense.”
― Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881-1897

“The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous”
― John le Carré

“When loneliness is a constant state of being, it harkens back to a childhood wherein neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence