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
We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air; We dug a spring in infancy Of water pure and fair; We sowed in youth a mustard seed, We cut an almond rod; We are now grown up to riper age Are they withered in the sod?
charlotte brontë— 1835 'We Wove a Web in Childhood'.
I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, foranyof us, is a handful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.
Penelope (Margaret) Lively— 1994 Oleander, Jacaranda, preface.
To hope does not mean to know the future, but rather to be open, in an attitude of spiritual childhood, to accepting it as a gift.
gustavo gutierrez— Chapter Eleven, Eschatology And Politics, p. 125
I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense...
beatrix potter— Journal entry (1896-11-17), from the National Trust collection.
I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read . The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy , and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
james baldwin— "Autobiographical Notes" (1952); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
graham greene— Pt. I, ch. 1
Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.
Rainer Maria Rilke— Letter Four (16 July 1903)
What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.
leo tolstoy— VI (A Letter to a Hindu (1908))
To have even known such a man as he was is an inestimable boon. To have been with him for so long as a child, to have known so intimately the man who above all others has understood childhood, is indeed a memory on which to look back with thanksgiving and with tears.
— Page 3 (The Story of Lewis Carroll (1899))
Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.
— Walter Savage Landor in: Thomas Chi Oil USA, OilUSA.Co, 1 December 2011, p.7
childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kind, sunshiny old age.
lydia maria child— Source: Letters from New York, vol. 1, letter 37.
