Childhood Quotes

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

~ Julian Barnes

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles, it was a miraculous world.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I know,” said Peter. “Perhaps better than anyone. But you can’t stay a child forever. To choose to speak into Echo’s Well is to choose illusion. To choose to avoid the responsibilities of being an adult. The real trick—the real choice—is to keep the best of the child you were, without forgetting when you grow up.“It is the best of both worlds, Jack. Being a child is to believe in magic everywhere…“…but even Peter Pan had to grow up one day.

~ James A. Owen

The last time you were happy about nothing, the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?

~ Jean Rhys

I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.

~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen, the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones.

~ Stephen King

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her. But, looking back on it now, I know that I was in love with Mrs Dempster. Not as some boys are in love with grown-up women, adoring them from afar and enjoying a fantasy life in which the older woman figures in an idealized form, but in a painful and immediate fashion; I saw her every day, I did menial tasks in her house, and I was charged to watch her and keep her from doing foolish things. Furthermore, I felt myself tied to her by the certainty that I was responsible for her straying wits, the disorder of her marriage, and the frail body of the child who was her great delight in life. I had made her what she was, and in such circumstances I must hate her or love her. In a mode that was far too demanding for my age or experience, I loved her.

~ Robertson Davies

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.

~ Stanisław Lem

I am not my mother. I love her, but I am not her.

~ Michelle Zink

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

~ Francine Prose

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

~ Willa Cather

They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.

~ Maud Hart Lovelace

Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her was like a grandmother who had used up all her stories and now simply rocked on the porch. The same flowers, the same streets, year after year. She longed for someone more exotic. A prince. A pirate.

~ Kathy Hepinstall

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

Soon never comes soon enough to a young child.

~ Jacqueline Carey

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

~ Dan Chaon

Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?

~ Annie Ernaux

It's sort of my go-to stock image of my childhood, actually. I think it has something to do with knowing I'll never be able to go back to that time that makes me cry every time I listen to it.

~ Mindy Kaling

...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

~ Joan Didion

Her own dolls were either babies or storybook characters like Cinderella and Snow White who though past childhood were somehow not yet into the world, girls who kept themselves apart from the world without really knowing what for. Now girls know what for. They menstruate when they are ten, and their dolls are sluts.

~ Josephine Humphreys

This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.

~ Lev Grossman

My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.

~ Charles Dickens

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

~ Neil Gaiman

Don't be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity.

~ Barry Hughart

Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep but it's not so badI don't worry and I don't weep. In fact I'm glad.Because I get up off my pillow and I flip on the light.I get down and get hip in the still of the night I stretch and I yawn and then I breathe real deep And dance myself to sleep.I hoof around my beddie just a-tappin' my toes Before I know what's happened I'm a-ready to doze Got some partners I can count the boogie-woogie sheepI dance myself to sleep.

~ Jim Henson

what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?

~ Leo Tolstoy

Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

~ Virginia Woolf

It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we wanted wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. Life would be one long party.Yes, that had been the dream.

~ John Marsden

They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days. She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish-–something they heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They had all their little treasures. . . And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and he believed it to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries––perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on.

~ Virginia Woolf

When you're a kid, you tend to see the best in your mates. Because at least they're not as bad as your parents.

~ Camilla Way

I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.

~ Stephen King

Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

~ John Gardner

Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That 'Builds Character.

~ Deb Caletti

To express nostalgia for a childhood we no longer share is to deny the actual significance and humanity of children.

~ Perry Nodelman

When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.

~ Heather O'neill

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way--and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was out in the open. Their lives were dirty and squalid, but they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Here, things seemed so normal, so perfect, but it was all a deception.

~ Jennifer Mcmahon