top of page
"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?"
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Childhood quotes

"A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers."

"To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience..."

"You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was."

"When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web."

"No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book."

"The problem with playing hide-and-seek with your sister is that sometimes she gets bored and stops looking for you.And there you are - under the couch, in the closet, wedged behind the lilac tree - and you don't want to give up, because maybe she's just biding her time. But maybe she's wandered off..."
Explore more quotes by George Eliot

"The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character."

"A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards."

"No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from."

"You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know."

"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."

"Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder."
bottom of page