Childhood Quotes

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

~ Lin Yutang

Peanut butter is the pate of childhood.

~ Florence Fabricant

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

~ Dean Koontz

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.

~ Annie Dillard

Shush – it’s silent time again.

~ Carla H. Krueger

The child I wasis just one breath away from me.

~ Sheniz Janmohamed

This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?' He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate.

~ Rudyard Kipling

With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before—simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.

~ Sol Luckman

...I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl -- a cousin I think -- having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she knew [my grandfather] would pass near four o'clock on the way to his dinner, said to him, 'If I were you and you were a little girl, I would give you a doll.

~ W.b. Yeats

In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own experience. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same.

~ Maxim Gorky

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

~ Pat Conroy

As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula.

~ Dave Barry

It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood.

~ Orson Scott Card

…because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.

~ Alan Bradley

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

The nutcracker sits under the holiday tree, a guardian of childhood stories. Feed him walnuts and he will crack open a tale...

~ Vera Nazarian

Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end.

~ Joe Hill

Why is it when we were kids we looked up at the stars... But now they seem to be looking down on us...?

~ Leonardo Donofrio

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home

~ Sue Monk Kidd

This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time, the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it.

~ Seré Prince Halverson

I didn't grow up in a Norman Rockwell house... my house was more akin to Norman Lear.

~ Michael P Naughton

He had been haunted his whole life by a mildcase of claustrophobia—the vestige of a childhood incident he had never quite overcome.Langdon’s aversion to closed spaces was by no means debilitating, but it had always frustrated him.It manifested itself in subtle ways. He avoided enclosed sports like racquetball or squash, and he hadgladly paid a small fortune for his airy, high-ceilinged Victorian home even though economical facultyhousing was readily available. Langdon had often suspected his attraction to the art world as a youngboy sprang from his love of museums’ wide open spaces.

~ Dan Brown

To observe is not to not feel—in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. 'I have two homes,' my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, 'and I have no home.' To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?

~ Rachel Cusk

as a childi supposei was not quitenormal.my happiest times werewheni was left alone inthe house on asaturday.

~ Charles Bukowski

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

~ William Golding

Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight

~ Vladimir Nabokov

So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little Mary had to be the chicken and Savannah shoved her out of the loft and broke her collarbone. The hearts of children are hard naturally because of their short memories. Everything they play with becomes true and unquestionable such as an acorn cap for a Holy Grail, such is the power of the untrained mind, and all our training of it is both of advantage and not.

~ Paulette Jiles

The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet - her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws - and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand. (The Pool)

~ Daphne Du Maurier

I miss those childish days of long ago, when one day was as long as twenty are now ...

~ C.j. Heck

I never felt more free in this world, than when I was five years old

~ Jeremy Aldana

Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues -- innocent joy and the boundless desire for love -- were the only motives in life?

~ Leo Tolstoy

Remember when we were children and life was simple, how I yearn to return to those days.

~ A.h. Septimius

When I was young and I was forced to watch Disney films, I would fast forward the good guys, wasn't interested in princes and princesses, only by the villains.

~ Nuno Roque

I want to be six years old again - just for a day.It's not that things were so much better back then. They sucked.But I was the kind of kid who knew how to laugh about it all.That's what I want. I want to laugh.

~ Jaye Murray

To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It's hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.

~ Erica Lorraine Scheidt

They say that as one grows older one mellows, become more tolerant. Perhaps. Sometimes I think it is more a stripping off, a peeling away of irrelevancies. But somehwere in youth, as childhood is left behind, certain truths about ourselves become apparent, and once we recognise them, we must abide by them.

~ Molly Izzard

Youth!! Ah, what a word!! And how transitory! But, how grand! as long as it lasts. How many millions in gold would pour out for an ability to call it all back, as with our musical myth, Faust. During that magic part of a child’s growth this world is just a gigantic inquiry box, containing many a topic for which a solution is paramount to a growing mind. And to whom can a child look, but us adults? Any man who “can’t stop now” to talk with a child upon a topic which, to him is“too silly for anything,” should look back to that day upon which that topic was dark and dubious in his own brain. A child who asks nothing will know nothing. That is why that “bump of inquiry” was put on top of our skulls.

~ Ernest Vincent Wright

No one chooses his parent or childhood, but you can choose your own direction. Everyone has problems and obstacles to overcome.

~ Anonymous