Childhood Quotes
 
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More Childhood Quotes
childhood is analogous to language learning. It has a biological basis but cannot be realized unless a social environment triggers and nurtures it, that is, has need of it. If a culture is dominated by a medium that requires the segregation of the young in order that they learn unnatural, specialized, and complex skills and attitudes, then childhood, in one form or another, will emerge, articulate and indispensable.
neil postman— Ch. 9 : Six Questions
I remember, I remember how my childhood fleeted by. The mirth of its December, and the warmth of its July.
winthrop mackworth praed— Winthrop Mackworth Praed, I Remember, I Remember.
It seems like a cliche, but you do grow up a lot faster when you travel a lot, go through things like this interview, spend time away from home and hang around with other actors. It's inevitable that you're not going to have a so-called normal childhood.
matt dillon— Michael Blowen (November 3, 1983), "Matt Dillon Meets Fame ....Diffidently", The Boston Globe.
Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
marvin minsky— Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1988) Ch.1
If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness When everything is as it was in my childhood Violent, vivid and of infinite possibility.
— 1947 'If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That Is Near Madness'.
To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.
giorgio de chirico— 'On Mystery and Creation', Giorgio de Chirico, Paris 1913, as quoted in "Letters of the great artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough", Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p . 231
Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.
lloyd demause— Ch. 2, ibid.
Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.
josé rizal— "Los Viajes"
The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.
— Charles Darwin in:Journal of Researches Into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. "Beagle" Round the World, Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N. Fifteenth Thousand, J. Murray, 1882, p.504
Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.
beryl bainbridge— The New York Times, March 1, 1981. [2]
What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.
lin yutang— Ch. IV : On Having A Stomach
Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?
Anton Chekhov— The Bishop (1902)
We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.
christopher hitchens— "Hating Sweden" (1989)
Tim Guest’s extraordinary account of his childhood in the communes of Bhagwan [Rajneesh], the notorious Indian guru, is a survivor’s tale, poignant, funny and wise.
— Christopher Hart (25 January 2004). "Review: Memoir: My Life in Orange by Tim Guest". The Sunday Times (Times Newspapers Ltd). Retrieved on 2008-10-17.
Backward, flow backward, O full tide of 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. I have grown weary of dust and decay, Weary of flinging my heart's wealth away Weary of sowing for others to reap; Rock me to sleep, mother, rock me to sleep.
— A. M. W. Ball, Rock me to Sleep, Mother. Attributed to Elizabeth Akers Allen. See Northern Monthly, Volume II. 1868. Pub. by Allen line Bassett, Newark, N. J. Appendix to March, Volume II. 1868. Ball shows proof that he wrote it in 1856–7. Produces witness who saw it before 1860. Mrs. Allen says she wrote it in Italy, 1860. It was published in The Knickerbocker Magazine, May, 1861.
I, who have not cried since my childhood , I cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have embraced.
— Henri Barbusse, in The Inferno (1917), L'Enfer, as translated by Edward J. O'Brien (1918), Ch. XVII
I had an idyllic childhood and when my parents bought me a Punch and Judy Show and a ventriloquist's dummy, I'd perform anywhere, anytime. My parents were wonderful when I told them I wanted to be an entertainer.
ken dodd— Quoted in Manchester Evening News, [3]Dodd's Bolton bonus, Natalie Anglesey. (2008-04-28)
There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream,And the nightingale sings round it all the day long;In the time of my childhood 'twas like a sweet dream,To sit in the roses and hear the bird's song.
thomas moore— Part II
I have never been a child prodigy. When I think back to my childhood, I can not discern any sign of future success. My only real talent couldn't be found in any curriculum: whistling.
bobbejaan schoepen— HUMO, 1964
Whatever I learned,Whatever I knew,Seems like those faded years of childhood that flew,Away in some dilemma,Always in some confusion,The purpose of this life,Seems like an illusion!
— Mehek Bassi, in Unveiling Our Illusion: New Moon/ Solar Eclipse, 29 April 2014
Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.
— p. 637 (Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990))
The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world . The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.
carl jung— The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913)
After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.
Marshall McLuhan— Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 443
It would be futile to deny that the Nazis built a vast mass of evil on a vast mass of prejudice. It would be equally futile to deny that strong prejudices against the Jews existed among Christians during the centuries before the Shoah. Since, moreover, the childhood of the European nations was passed under the tutelage of the clergy, we should not be surprised that these prejudices were, in part, ecclesiastically inculcated.
— Mark Riebling, "Jesus, Jews and the Shoah" (2003)
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journal entry (1847)
He more we live, more brief appear Our life's succeeding stages; A day to childhood seems a year, And years like passing ages.
thomas campbell— Thomas Campbell, A Thought Suggested by the New Year.
