Childhood Quotes

“Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.”
― Franny Billingsley, Chime

“I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them”
― Maurice Sendak

“The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.”
― Andre Breton

“(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself

“as a child
i suppose
i was not quite
normal.


my happiest times were
when
i was left alone in
the house on a
saturday.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

“You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.”
― Glenn Beck, The 7: Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life

“You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.”
― Sir Ken Robinson

“...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?”
― Nicole Krauss, Great House

“To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Look, I am living. On what? Neither
childhood nor future
lessens . . . . Superabundant existence
wells in my heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“A child isn’t born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let’s just say that when I realized that I didn’t want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can’t go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map.”
― Hiromi Goto

“Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents...”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.”
― Katherine Dunn

“Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...”
― Giambattista Vico, New Science

“When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“It will be the kiss by which all others in your life will be judged... and found wanting.”
― Anthony Hopkins

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”
― Elizabeth Lawrence, Through the Garden Gate

“What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

“Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.”
― Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

“We take it for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum.You move as a rower moves: facing backwards.

You can see where you've been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you.

It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir.

You'd see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real.

You’d know which friendships will last, which days are important, and prepare for upcoming mistakes. You'd go to school, and learn to forget.

One by one you'd patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before you
meet and go your separate ways.

And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger.

You'd become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness.

You'd fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything.

Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again.

You wouldn't have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out.

You'd know from the start which week was the happiest you’ll ever be, so you could relive it again and again.

You'd remember what home feels like,
and decide to move there for good.

You'd grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving.

You'd try everything one last time, until it all felt new again.

And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you’d think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people.

You'd start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last.

Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood.

You'd become generous, and give everything back.

Pretty soon you’d run out of things to give, things to say, things to see.

By then you'll have found someone perfect; and she'll become your world.

And you will have left this world just as you found it.

Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.”
― The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“Your pants didn't get smaller, Mommy," I assured her. "Your butt got bigger.”
― Gordon Korman, No More Dead Dogs

“…but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she was older, there was no difference between them.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“It's funny how much of childhood is about proximity. Like who your best friend is is directly correlated to how close your houses are; who you sit next to in music is all about how close your names are in the alphabet. Such a game of chance.”
― Jenny Han, To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.

But no matter how long the girl looks, she feels nothing. Puzzled, she looks for the girl who wanted to be an explorer, the girl who wanted to learn deep-sea diving and mountain-climbing, the girl who wanted to travel the stars. But she can't find her. That girl died when her parents did, in a little shop in the slums of November. And now she has no soul left to shatter.

She closes the shade over the window.”
― Amie Kaufman, This Shattered World

“and that makes him wish all over again that his dad would stop crying, so he can have a turn.”
― Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro