Childhood Quotes

Years later, I remember the waxy taste of the yellow paint, the papery taste of splintered wood, the sharp metallic of the graphite.

~ Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.

~ Gérard De Nerval

Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.

~ Virginia Woolf

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

~ Willa Cather

A pure white puppy followed on the girl’s heels, barking, and the girl laughed in the breathless, drunken way of children as she ran into the hallway.

~ Kit Alloway

Every summer, like the roses, childhood returns.

~ Marty Rubin

But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn't have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclination

~ Dean Koontz

I would think of certain winter nights when he wedged himself between Nona and me in bed, a furtive warmth embedded in his skin already tinctured with virginal earth and milk and possibility, or how that peculiar scent common to all small children before the age of five--sunshine sweetened hair, a nascent woodsiness in him exuding youthful exuberance--gripped us, suspended us eighties in the sense that our hope, our very survival, depended on the fulfillment of this child's dreams. How I took those years I spent for granted, believing them unalterable? pg. 9

~ S.k. Kalsi

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

~ Dean Koontz

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.

~ Matthew Flaming

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.

~ Roman Payne

Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags

~ Jennifer E. Smith

For him, it appeared he could freezethe moment in a memory; only for it to slip through hishands like water.

~ J.u. Scribe

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

~ Agatha Christie

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst.

~ Alice Munro

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

~ Jenny Han

Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ♥

~ Susan Branch

Ghosts are not what I remember of my childhood; but somehow they infuse memories of myself as a child, the little girl in a storybook, with ghosts hovering around her.

~ Yolanda A. Reid

Some people discard their childhood like an old hat. They forget about it like a phone number that's no longer valid. They used to be kids, then they became adults - but what are they now?Only those who grow up but continue to be children are humans.

~ Erick Kästner

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

~ Anne Rice

I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now.

~ Crystal Woods

... 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.

~ Lev S. Vygotsky

The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.

~ Kristen Crockett

I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.

~ Marian Wright Edelman

I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up.

~ Ken Follett

There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misunderstood, in the ways that they treated me. At times, I had felt completely loved and accepted by my parents, but for one reason or another, they were unable to care for me, provide for me, in some ways that would have been very important. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to make up for the experiences in life that were absent when I was a child.

~ Jonathan Harnisch

Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults, and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.

~ Thomas Szasz

During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid wants to be.

~ Jennifer Senior

All fathers are liars . . . If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.

~ Alison Espach

The reason any person yaks excessively is because his communication is not being adequately acknowledged. He just keeps trying to be heard.

~ Ruth Minshull

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.

~ David Brooks

He was a bad, bad bastard. He abused the privilege of being a cunt, as my old Da would say.’ I smiled, picturing the cozy fireside scene of young son on father’s knee being inducted into the world of abusive epithets.

~ Craig Russell

I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that if I didn't exist, the family would be better off. I grew up believing that if I had never been born, things would be easier for the people I loved. (page 35)

~ Donald Miller

Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life - that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower's parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren't alive, their family couldn't function. (page 34)

~ Donald Miller

What better reminder do we have than our kids of our own best selves, our less stressed and more carefree selves? In their silliness we see the echo of the way we used to be: when we were kids, yes, but also before we had kids, or even two weeks ago, before all of the stress of these year-end corporate meetings. Their joy, their infectious enthusiasm, their sense of mission as the poor dog is dressed in boxer shorts, cannot help but cajole you, and beckon you, to lighten up.

~ Kim John Payne

My mother is European and expresses her love through food and cuddling. She wasn't the type of mother who would make it to school plays or soccer games, but if you wanted to stay at home sick, she was your girl. Whenever you'd go up to her room to cuddle with her, she'd pull out a Kit Kat or Snickers bar from her night table and look at you with dancing eyes.

~ Chelsea Handler

As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.

~ Pat Conroy

A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY

~ Roald Dahl

But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents -- or a whole lot of us, at least -- lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father -- or even better, both of them in tandem -- then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence.

~ Robert Mccammon

I remember the pain I felt, and wonder why a man who was such an accomplished liar had to tell the truth that day.

~ Toni Maguire