quotations about childhood
So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.
PABLO NERUDA
Winter Garden
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
Our Man in Havana
The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
Childhood is that wonderful time of life when all you need to do to lose weight is take a bath.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
What is childhood
Something we remember
Rarely
Barely
Sometimes in Decembers
But then it's known to catch our
Eye
And dare us all to
Once more try
And with a childhood faith believe
TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA
"Childhood Dreams"
A happy childhood is the pledge of a ripe manhood.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
MARTIN AMIS
"Martin Amis Contemplates Evil", Smithsonian Magazine, Sep. 2012
You can go through life and make new friends every year--every month practically--but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
O happy childhood! blessed youth!
But once we know thy potent power;
But once we live all careless free;
No cross to mar our love-lit bower.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Heart-Yearnings"
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones
Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.
ANTHONY HOROWITZ
The House of Silk
It is only when we start enjoying childhood that we have stepped out of it.
DIMITRI SEMENIKHIN
The Ghost and the Storyteller
I had been lonely from my childhood's hour
Childhood whose very happiness is love.
LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON
Erinna
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
Looking back to my childhood is like looking at a 1000-piece puzzle laid out separately on a table, challenging me to piece together the picture but much harder because so many of my memories are forgotten through the rivers of time.
CAROLYN RESNICK
Naked Liberty
Childhood is a disease -- a sickness that you grow out of.
WILLIAM GOLDING
London Guardian, Jun. 22, 1990
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
BRIAN ALDISS
Billion Year Spree