"Our culture sentimentalizes children, and we forget one of the things that we should most remember from that time of our lives: Children know that this world can be hard on them, harder than it is on adults. They are physically weaker than adults, financially dependent, and in times of danger, nothing clarifies our thinking more than an awareness of our extreme vulnerability."

Childhood, Sensitivity, Strength, Reality

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"Our culture sentimentalizes children, and we forget one of the things that we should most remember from that time of our lives: Children know that this world can be hard on them, harder than it is on adults. They are physically weaker than adults, financially dependent, and in times of danger, nothing clarifies our thinking more than an awareness of our extreme vulnerability."

Exlpore more Childhood quotes

"Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism."

Thomm Quackenbush, American Author

Childhood, Awe, Holiday, Resentment

"I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships."

Tommy Rettig, American Actor

Childhood, Relationships

"My father... removed from Kentucky to... Indiana, in my eighth year... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up... Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher... but that was all."

Abraham Lincoln, American Politician

Childhood, Memory, Learning, Life

"The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic."

Bill Cosby, American Comedian

Childhood, Friends, Play

"And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics."

William Joyce, American Author

Childhood, Mathematics

"When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind."

Patrick Rothfuss, Australian Athlete

Childhood, Innocence, Future, Freedom

"There's an inexplicable joy that exists on a brown child's face and in the way they navigate their world long before they discover they're hated."

Darnell Lamont Walker, American Writer

Childhood, Joy, Innocence, Identity

"When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew."

Thom Gunn, British Poet

Childhood, First, Gay, Teachers, Teaching

"I was such a sullen, angry, sad kid. I'm sure there are writers who have had happy childhoods, but what are you going to write about? No ghosts, no fear. I'm very happy that I had an unhappy and uncomfortable childhood."

Isabel Allende, Chilean Writer

Childhood, Pain, Creativity, Writing

"My kitchen looks like the one from my childhood - very homey, with a little bit of Alice in Wonderland!"

Paris Hilton, American Celebrity

Childhood, Kitchen

Explore more quotes by Dean Koontz

"...I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace."

Grace

"I would die of lonely."

Loneliness

"Darkness doesn't fall at a predictable schedule. Darkness can overwhelm you any time of the day, as you know well."

Darkness

"I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather...the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side."

Law

"On those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before."