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
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 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))
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.
Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.
josé rizal— "Los Viajes"
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)
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
Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet isthemiserable Irish Catholic childhood.
— 1996 Angela's Ashes, ch.1.
No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.
Peter Ackroyd— Chatterton (London: Abacus, [1987] 1991), ch. 10, p. 151.
I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this.
jack kerouac— "The Origins of the Beat Generation" in Playboy (June 1959)
If you analyze a host of real world outcomes using adoption studies, fraternal v. identical twin studies, twins-raised-apart studies, the history of early childhood intervention research, naturally-occurring experiments, differences between societies, changes over history, and so forth, you tend to come up with nature and nurture as being about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty. The glass is roughly half-full and half-empty.
steve sailer— Sailer, Steve (October 25, 2012). A Short, Stylized Dialogue On Epigenetics. VDARE.com. Retrieved on October 27, 2012.
Paddington…has become a part of the folk-lore of childhood, not because he appears in a great or even a particularly good book, but because there is something in his personality which lodges permanently in the imagination.
michael bond— Marcus Crouch The Nesbit Tradition: The Children's Novel in England, 1945-70 (London: Ernest Benn, 1972) p. 107.
I was forgiven by forgiving many things Including my long-ago childhood I was healed, but I intended [ to ] heal I've just noticed, the way I was saved by love Though I tried to keep love away.
ayumi hamasaki— Rainbow
What do you suppose makes all men look back to the time of childhood with so much regret (if their childhood has been, in any moderate degree, healthy or peaceful)? That rich charm, which the least possession had for us, was in consequence of the poorness of our treasures.
john ruskin— Lecture V, section 82.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
virginia woolf— "A Sketch of the Past"
There was a place in childhood that I remember well. And there a voice of sweetest tone bright fairy tales did tell.
samuel lover— Samuel Lover, My Mother Dear.
