Childhood Quotes

Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

~ Dean Koontz

The earliest childhood memories are woven by shadows. And some of these shadows are woven from fire.

~ Plamen Chetelyazov

I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.

~ Jack Kerouac

They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much.

~ Alice Hoffman

So to all who are situated as I am, I would say--Grow up as fast as you can.

~ Randolph Bourne

Often, under the layers of our maturity is a child’s insecurity screaming for love and attention.

~ Charles F. Glassman

I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.

~ Dave Matthes

I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn't understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once.

~ Terry Pratchett

Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights.

~ Brenda Sutton Rose

The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable.

~ David Vann

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?

~ Philip Roth

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.

~ Dean Koontz

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

~ Cheryl Strayed

I puked rainbows all over my childhood, and it felt so good.

~ L.k. Elliott

I would have dearly liked to close the French doors between us for a bit of peace, but Mam wouldn't allow it; she said that solitude would give me ideas and the last thing a boy of my age needed was ideas.

~ John Boyne

The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our chilhood behind.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

My whole life is out here-the whole of my life...I'd come here naked, as a boy-straight from that river out there-throw my clothes on the floor and climb into that loft and lie there dreaming in the hay...All those summer days-scouring the banks of the Avon for smooth, round stones-scaring up ducks and foxes-kingfishers-swallows...somebody's dog...Oh, God-I want it back. Throwing stones that never reached the other shore. And the games-the games-the games, and all my friends...

~ Timothy Findley

Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we're growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free child soul.

~ Jirō Taniguchi

I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words. But I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

~ Harper Lee

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?

~ Anne Frank

...the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

The very matrix of our ability to love and bond in later life, maternal sensitivity – or lack thereof – also determines cultural tenor.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Harry was a bright boy. And like many bright boys, he had a little mischief in him.

~ Patrick Yee

Vivien thought how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn't know the first thing about being brave.

~ Kate Morton

A mosaic of memories takes me back to my own childhood, and then to my children. My earliest memory of St. Augustine was a day trip from Jacksonville; a day with some neighbors who were nice enough to purchase me a plastic toy-tugboat with a blue superstructure and white hull. Other accounts meld into my adult years. With its history and attractions, The Ancient City is pristine and picturesque by most accounts; but from the Newer Jail (not the Old Jail) , the perspective is very different.

~ H. Kirk Rainer

The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.But no matter how long the girl looks, she feels nothing. Puzzled, she looks for the girl who wanted to be an explorer, the girl who wanted to learn deep-sea diving and mountain-climbing, the girl who wanted to travel the stars. But she can't find her. That girl died when her parents did, in a little shop in the slums of November. And now she has no soul left to shatter.She closes the shade over the window.

~ Amie Kaufman

If you ever want to see heaven, watch a bunch of young girls play. They are all sweat and skinned knees. Energy and open faces.

~ Amy Poehler

When you're a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.

~ John Scalzi

And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the summer and I hear the bees buzzing and for a moment I truly am Alice in Wonderland, do you have the heart to tell me I am not?

~ John Logan

Lenny’s face was smiling, too. For a minute they were both ten years old. Time travel in real life.

~ Lynne Rae Perkins

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

~ Graham Greene

As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

~ Heather O'neill

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did.

~ Rick Bragg

Father never approved of my toysSaw them as child's playthingsI was a childThey were my worldI ruled thereAnd he stepped on themDestroying themAnd in turnDestroyed meI should have been left to playNow I must step on everything

~ T.p. Louise

Yet I had become very attached to George Roc. I liked him, not for the joy of playing with him, not for some talent that made him stand out from the rest, not even for his kindness: above all, I liked him because he was always sad and because the things he told me caused me a degree of pain.....George Roc was the first being that I'd met who saw and felt himself unhappy.

~ Joseph Zobel

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one.

~ Valente

Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.

~ Delia Sherman

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

~ John Updike

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and . . . Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and . . . And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling . . . paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody.

~ David Almond

Carelessness was once something to be owned. They wore it around their necks as they joined the springtime breeze while ducking in and out of the forest believing their fairy tale.

~ A. Lynn