Childhood Quotes - Page 2

The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.

Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.

Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.

Where his boyhood retreat had been a cave hewn for one, it now accommodated two. He was suddenly two and it amazed and delighted, causing a stir in the pit of him, a kind of fibrillation.

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

The fantasy of life;When I was a child, I said ‘I can’t wait to grow up’.When I was adult, I said ‘I miss childhood adventures’.

When I was a child I spake as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things.

You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.

The Babar the Elephant book is sitting in front of me. I pick it up and start reading it. I remember reading it as a small Boy and enjoying it and imagining that I was friends with Babar, his constant Companion during all of his adventures. He went to the moon, I went with him. He fought Tomb Raiders in Egypt, I fought alongside him. He rescued his elephant girlfriend from Ivory Hunters on the Savanna, I coordinated the getaway. I loved that goddamn Elephant and I loved being his friend. In a childhood full of unhappiness and rage, Babar is one of the few pleasant memories that I have. Me and Babar, kicking some motherfucking ass.

Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are heavily influenced by this.

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

You don't have to go back to the way things were. Just go back to the point where you left off. Don't start over... just keep going, but there's a right way of keeping going. And no one here is going to be angry at you for leaving. We all have to leave sometimes. And some of us never come back. But there's always a choice, even if you've already decided never to return. You can still come back from this. That is the only kind of faith that matters. Not in the world, not in...God..., not in our friendship... just in yourself.

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.

You see, I don't think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12….

Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.

My school-days! The silent gliding on of my existence—the unseen, unfelt progress of my life—from childhood up to youth! Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran.

I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

Over the years our mother has beaten us with belts, shoes, rulers, extension cords, hair brushes, a wooden spoon, a fly swatter, a toilet brush, wire coat hangers, wooden coat hangers and sometimes one of our own toys. When you get whacked by your own paddleball paddle or you have to watch your sister getting spanked with a badminton racquet that she asked Santa Claus (AKA Grandma) to bring, you don't feel much like playing with those things ever again.

[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.

I met Baba Yaga at the end of childhood – past pigtails and fairytales, but not quite ready to give up on make-believe.

What a tremendous power one needs to become his own master!

Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.

Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.

Does childhood really happen? Do we imagine it? Everyone remembers something else....

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

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.

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

My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.

The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.

their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need.

Believe in Eternity, believe in childhood, believe that the beauty of innocence lives on and on and on. I know it does.

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

No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer.

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.

I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman's poem,"Loveliest of trees, the cherry nowIs hung with bloom upon the bough.It stands among the woodland ride,Wearing white for Eastertide.Now, of my three-score years and ten,Twenty will not come again..."and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, "Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow," they would have said, "Oh,no, you don't. You're going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren't cherry trees, those are crab apples.

Say what you will, dear sister, we do what we do for the promise of our youth. Yet it is always they who scar beneath the points of daggers.

The child is not a citizen of the future; he (sic) is a citizen from the very first moment of life and also the most important citizen because he represents and brings the 'possible'...a bearer, here and now of rights, of values, of culture...It is our hiostorical responsibility not only to affirm this but the create cultural, social, political and educational contexts which are able to receive children and dialogue with their potential for constructing human rights.

I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.

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.

Because a child is bound to grow, society is intent upon cultivating the child’s mind to mature into a very specific type of responsible person. Children take great pleasure in small things that have no practical purpose in their dreamy world where they can be as wild as wind. Each year a part of the child dies, as it is burden with adult responsibilities.

Up there in the sky.Don’t you see him?No, not the moon.The Man in the Moon.He wasn’t always a man.Nor was he always on the moon.He was once a child.Like you.Until a battle,a shooting star,and a lost balloonled him on a quest.Meet the very firstGuardian of Childhood.MiM, the Man in the Moon.

That’s the trouble with memories: everything seems much more fantastical with a childhood lens to filter out the limitations of reality.

Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom.It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June.We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder.She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.

Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to.

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.

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

On some level, with its carrousels and castle and cowboys, its mysterious jungle and its animated characters, Disneyland is a highly idealized elaboration of our childhoods. It can be seen as a portal through which we revisit (maybe even heal) our youth.

Somehow, the days of summer with their glimmering enchantment of dancing ladybugs and sailing clouds had faded into grey. Maddie’s heart had somehow faded with it.

While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights.

I have grown up listening to my grandparents’ stories about ‘the other side’ of the border. But, as a child, this other side didn’t quite register as Pakistan, or not-India, but rather as some mythic land devoid of geographic borders, ethnicity and nationality. In fact, through their stories, I imagined it as a land with mango orchards, joint families, village settlements, endless lengths of ancestral fields extending into the horizon, and quaint local bazaars teeming with excitement on festive days. As a result, the history of my grandparents’ early lives in what became Pakistan essentially came across as a very idyllic, somewhat rural, version of happiness.

Misery is a scar on the soul, that if it begins in childhood, it lasts the whole lifetime. I understand that no two scars are alike, but I also ask myself; even if these scars are not alike, aren’t these things engraved on our souls signed by which we know each other?Aren’t we also alike?

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.

No one chooses his parent or childhood, but you can choose your own direction. Everyone has problems and obstacles to overcome.

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.

How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?

There’s a wound most troubled boys share, which, at its core, comes from the feeling that they don’t have their father’s unconditional love.

... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.

Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.

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...