Childhood Quotes - Page 4

The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself - that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you didn't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air of a tire.

Stephen King

Summer on the farm was glorious. Peter spent as much time out of doors as possible, and he had many playmates, since all the children were free from their spring and autumn duties of tending crops or going to school. Peter had become the leader of a merry band of youngsters, aged six to fourteen, who followed the Wild Boy wherever he went and seemed to understand his unintelligible noises. If they did not understand, then they pretended to. The life of a princess has many advantages, but I envied those children for their time with Peter and for what seemed to me to be a simple, carefree existence.

Christopher Daniel Mechling

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.

Ursula K Le Guin

That's the most terrible thing about being a child; you're convinced that it's all your fault." Lulu

Ruth Reichl

To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream......if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.

Jean Cocteau

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

Bruce Chatwin

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.

Ruth Ozeki

What I’m suggesting is that the essence of leadership is soundness and that the essence of soundness is soul, which paradoxical as you might think it is, is that child within.

Tim Macartney-Snape

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.

Sylvia Kristel

Childhood is a slum and they love it.

Helen Dunmore

The foundations of your childhood, they stay with you.

Cassandra Clare

Never stop screaming, playing and laughing, it's part of our childhood wich will always be with us.

Romina Noriega

I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention.

Kenny Guinn

I gave up on ever trying to get 'my way.' I barely knew it existed.

Roz Chast

In an age of iPhones and Playstations, it's great to see that somebody's still rocking the bus-on-a-string.

Brandon Stanton

Throughout my entire miserable childhood I woke at least once a night weeping from overwhelming delight. I did it hungry, I did it after beatings, I did it after the deaths of loved ones.Now you tell me if I’m crazy or if I’ve always been blessed.

Bob Thurber

Art is childhood.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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

In a way I haven't quite stopped mourning the end of my childhood.

Emma Koenig

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

A preserved childhood is better than a repaired adulthood

Fabcos Famas

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

Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on the way to the full personhood of the adult… Every lived moment has an eternal significance and already constitutes a fulfilled life. For fulfilled life is not measured by the number of years that have been lived through, or spent in one way or another. It is measured according to the depth of lived experience.

Jürgen Moltmann

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

What would it be like to feel so attached, so intrinsically bonded, so protective of one’s own best connection with time and the ages, of generations past and future, of another human life, of their time?

J.R. Tompkins

The greatest memories a person might have in their life is, childhood. It's really a painful nostalgia.

Lathish R. Shankar

The birth of a new born baby is a great joy.

Lailah Gifty Akita

And what do I know about humans? Only this: My name is Doloria Maria de la Cruz, and I'm not just the end of childhood. I'm the end of humanity. And if you come from the skies- I'm coming for you.

Margaret Stohl

He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves.

Mark Costello

Childhood is not all candy stores and recess; it’s frustrations and confusions, too.

Chelsey Philpot

They say adolescent 'best' friendships are like love affairs where we learn the rules of relationships: commitment, trust, loyalty, jealousy, exchange, loss. Not being acquainted with the theories of friendship, Charles and Lise chose each other out of good humoured envy. Each wanted the life of the other.

Barbara Wels

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

And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.

Maya Angelou

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

Children with less opportunities often become adults with more flexibility.

M.Sriteja

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

For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.

Anthony M. Esolen

A team goes through stages of birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, maturity, and aging in its development.

Sunday Adelaja

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

Kate Atkinson

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 … 19 Next

Childhood Quotes - Page 4

Related Topics