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
Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.
josé rizal— "Los Viajes"
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
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.
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
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'.
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.
The seen and seeing softly mutually strike Their glass barrier that arrests the sight. But the world's being hides in the volcanoes And the foul history pressed into its core; And to myself my being is my childhood And passion and entrails and the roots of senses; I'm pressed into the inside of a mask At the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.
stephen spender— "The Mask" (The Still Centre (1939))
Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.
beryl bainbridge— The New York Times, March 1, 1981. [2]
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
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)
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))
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
childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.
anthony daniels— Frontpage Magazine Interview (August 31, 2005)
Remember your own childhood. That complete certainty you had, looking at the grown-ups, that you would never be like that. It was a lonely feeling, but euphoric, too.
— 1994 Interview with Sarah Gristwood in The Times Magazine, 'Jane Campion: A Childhood',1 Jan.
The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day. Be famous then By wisdom; as thy empire must extend, So let extend thy mind o'er all the world.
john milton— 1671Paradise Regained, bk.4, l.220-3.
What a childhood I had. My mother never breast-fed me. She said she liked me as a friend.
rodney dangerfield— p. 19 (It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect But Plenty of Sex and Drugs (2004))
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, / And what bright unreal path has led me here?'
philip larkin— Lines from an early poem, letter to J.B. Sutton, 16 April 1941
You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for — if you are honest — you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.
p. l. travers— As quoted in Sticks and Stones : The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (2002) by Jack Zipes
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— Chapter 1, "The Rowan Tree"
The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.
dmitri shostakovich— Page 6 (Testimony (1979))
Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature.
— Edmund Sears, p. 177. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
