quotations about childhood
Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleas'd with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Man
Childhood is supposed to be happy, and if you can't remember yours with any happiness, what hope have you later, when life starts handing you fresh grief?
AMITY GAIGE
Good Housekeeping, Feb. 2009
So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.
JOHN GARDNER
Grendel
Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!
I am so weary of toil and of tears--
Toil without recompense, tears all in vain--
Take them, and give me my childhood again!
ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN
"Rock Me to Sleep"
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
Matilda
A rose gets its color and fragrance from the root, and man his virtue from his childhood.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family -- children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses -- you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Atlantic, Oct. 15, 1997
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
The Time Traveler's Wife
Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in afterlife the images first presented to it. The first thing continues forever with the child. The first joy, the first sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of his life.
SAMUEL SMILES
Character
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
Lullabies for Little Criminals
They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.
PAT CONROY
The Prince of Tides
It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.
L.R. KNOST
Two Thousand Kisses a Day
I'm sliding on the rainbows of my childhood dreams.
NELLY FURTADO
"Childhood Dreams"
Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.
IVAN DOIG
The Whistling Season
Ah, we were blest in Arcady!
Our hearts were innocent and free,
We had no word for doubt or fear,
We knew no sorrow and no tear,
We felt no heart-ache and no pang,
But lived and loved and laughed and sang--
Nor dreamed that heaven could happier be
Than our glad life in Arcady!
ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN
"Exiles from Arcady"
[Growing up] is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Crack-Up
Childhood is like a sunbeam over the clouded parts of existence, and often grows more vivid with the lapse of years. I have seen it in the chamber of mortal sickness, allaying the pang of anguish, by the magic of a fresh flower laid upon the pillow, by the song of the nesting bird, by the waving of the green branches at the open window; I have seen it mingling even with delirium, and the fever dream, soothing images of the cherished garden, the violet covered bank, the falling waters, or the favorite grove.
MRS. L. H. SIGOURNEY
"On the Perception of the Beautiful", Connecticut Common School Journal, February 1, 1840
Contemplating childhood is like contemplating a beautiful region as one rides backwards; one really becomes aware of the beauty at that moment, that very instant, when it begins to vanish.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
journal entry, July 30, 1838
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose