Childhood Quotes

Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.

~ Ishmael Beah

There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.

~ John Le Carré

Think of the Christmas presentof gashes you opened when, in an attempt to be Superman, you slid in stocking feet on a slippery wood floor and crashed half way through a window. Hopes of heroism dashed on the heels of no clear sighting of Santa.

~ Kristen Henderson

One of the things that Eva hated the most about being a kid was how everyone always told her that childhood was the best time of their entire lives, and don't grow up too fast, and enjoy these carefree days while you can. In those moments, her body felt like the world's smallest prison, and she escaped in her mind to her chile plants, resting on rock wool substrate under a grow light in a bedroom closet, as much a prisoner of USDA hardiness zone 5b as she was.

~ J. Ryan Stradal

Envy is a much natural byproduct when your childhood isn’t the way it is supposed to be

~ Faraaz Kazi

But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.

~ Neil Gaiman

I only wanted to tell you that this was the wonderful time for you. Don’t let any of it go by without enjoying it. There won’t be any more merry-go-rounds. No more cotton candy. No more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you, Martin, that this is the wonderful time. Now! Here! That’s all. That’s all I wanted to tell you.

~ Rod Serling

Either I can go back to my childhood or my childhood can come forth to me. This is what I'm desperately wishes...

~ Hira Shahid Kazim

I knew that the tears of adults were wetter, saltier, and much, much sadder than those of a child

~ Thomas Burnett Swann

It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything.

~ Stephen King

The earlier years - the ones I've just been telling you about - they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can't help feeling a sort of glow.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Childhood is an exploratory period of calculated investigation. The nagging feeling that a child’s life has not really began until he or she attains adulthood makes growing up both a whimsical and fretful time. Childhood is not all merriment since a child realizes that seamless youthful days are an experiment for adulthood.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Sometimes It's awesome to be childish with your friend or partner.

~ Dinakar Reddy

But Claire had long ago realized, even after those constant dreams of her mother leaving faded away, that when you are abandoned as a child, you are never able to forget that people are capable of leaving, even if they never do.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?

~ Nicholson Baker

Once upon a time there was a girl named Debbie Jacobs and a boy named Teddy Dennis.

~ Rick Remender

That is the problem with being twelve. All the grown-ups think they have a right to know your business.

~ Paul Kearney

I suppose the only time we ever really get to be happy in life—like one hundred percent blissful—is when we’re little kids.Because there’s less to worry about?Because we’re too stupid to know how worried we should be.

~ Brian K. Vaughan

Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations.

~ Mary Doria Russell

You throw a sponge into a sink full of dirty water and it'll soak up several times its weight and hold onto it. Throw something less porous, like a stone, into a sink full of dirty water, and it'll still get wet. Pull it out and it feels about the same, weighs about the same, but there's a slight change in texture, a film over it, and droplets of water are still settled into the minuscule pits and crevices of the stone. Even as a child, I recognized hypocrisy and prejudice at play, but I was also at my most impressionable and, inevitably, whether I liked it or not, I retained bits of it.

~ Brianna Karp

I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me ‘diffident’) and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder... I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached others, all my fear forgotten.

~ Oliver Sacks

[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.

~ Oliver Sacks

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?

~ Patti Smith

...ya can't get to Nevada on five bucks and a bad heart...

~ Dave Matthes

From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded himJoyfully

~ Anne Carson

My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.

~ Oliver Sacks

There's one best thing about childhood our genuine smile...

~ Shivangi Lavaniya

When I was a kid I worried that when I woke up, I'd find my family having breakfast with my doppelgänger. We would fight to the death, and then my family would peacefully finish breakfast.

~ Fran Krause

I could sum up my younger life in one word.-Misunderstanding. Most of my school life was spend in protection mode. Which made any 'benefit' I could get from socializing, useless.

~ Tinaj. Richardson

As child, when the elders spoke their wise words, it only echoes in my ears. As an adult, I have crystal clear insight to the wise aphorisms by the elderly.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.

~ Oliver Sacks

To all the boys, for when you become men: you'll leave women all throughout your life because they're holding you back, and even after she's gone she'll still weigh you down. To all the women: stay away from us men. We don't know anything about you, despite what we try to convince you of.

~ Dave Matthes

...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.

~ Dave Matthes

It would be a very long time before we saw any of our original pursuers again. At least, it seemed kinda long. But nothing warps time quite like childhood. I remember visits to faraway worlds that lasted only a few days but felt like entire lifetimes. And then there were the endless journeys between destinations that somehow went by in the blink of an eye. You know how it goes.

~ Brian K. Vaughan

That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal.

~ Sigmund Freud

Wasteland is land which is worthlessfor cultivation. Like a child who has been emotionallybruised in a way that can never heal.

~ Pankaj Suneja

I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world. ... I wonderes if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

~ Neil Gaiman

My world was very limited in size and experience. Small things took on extra importance, at least to a child.

~ Dan Groat

You were very serious,” her grandmother continued. “You had these big brown eyes and you were always going, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ You wondered what everything was. You would frown and point a lot, like a conductor looking for your orchestra. You always seemed very busy, like you were between appointments all the time, but you were just a little child.

~ Carrie Fisher