Childhood Quotes

Your responsibility as an adult is accept your childhood and make your own choice of life.

~ Kathy Mckeon

I was nine when I figured out it’s better to be respected than liked.

~ A.d. Aliwat

Life is ironic. Some people use their terrible childhood as an excuse of their unfortunate rest of the life… while others create a masterpiece out of their terrible childhood, they create a story loved by the entire world.

~ Nino Varsimashvili

Don`t you worry Roald Dahl, The 6-year old me loved you but the 16-year old me worships you.

~ Vaishnavi Hajari

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.

~ Gregory Benford

A shaft of sunlight pierced the dark cluds and she looked up to see a silver lining. It was a sign, she thought.

~ Diane Grifith

The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedf ellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be.

~ Richard Dawkins

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.

~ Richard Dawkins

A child s a special possession from God.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I do not love. Love is only for women who are complete. I cannot love while my heart lacks safety and in my wallet there is enough money to pay for a loaf of bread. I cannot kiss you while I am thinking of the house rent and the electricity bills. I cannot behave as a mature woman who can exchange with you phrases of love while my childhood is not yet complete. This is an unfair compromise for safety and for existence.  We only call it love to preserve our dignity.

~ Jihad Eltabey

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

~ Dr. Seuss

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

~ John Connolly

Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.

~ George R.r. Martin

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.

~ Orson Scott Card

Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

~ Ransom Riggs

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

~ Madeleine L'engle

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

~ Roald Dahl

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.

~ Pablo Neruda

Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.

~ Richard Paul Evans

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

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

People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.

~ Bryan White

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 islike a yellow hole. . .

~ Markus Zusak

Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?

~ Louis De Bernières

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

My mother would say, 'Why are you always playing alone?' And I would say, 'I'm not playin', Ma. I'm fuckin' serious!

~ George Carlin

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

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

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 Mccammon

I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper. And, of course, after that it's just a small step to full-blown sociopath.

~ George Carlin

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous

~ John Le Carré

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

~ Sylvia Plath

. . . it is true, even people with painful childhoods. . . grow up to be more interesting people. So, there's always a positive to a negative.

~ Barbra Streisand

Men do not quit playing because they grow old, they grow old because they quit playing.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

~ George Eliot

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

~ Harry Truman