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Childhood Quotes
"When I was young, my favorite picture book was 'Fletcher and Zenobia,' written by Edward Gorey and illustrated by Victoria Chess. It's long out of print now, but its mix of macabre humor and 1960s psychedelia made it a perfect children's book for the times."
15
"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
15
"There's always one sure way of finding out that you're a misfit. When you're eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch 'Twilight' and that it was "sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic!" - but you've been spending the summer watching 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Don't Look Now' and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart - that's the moment you realize that you're a misfit."
13
"We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon."
12
"I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one."
12
"Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood."
12
"My childhood is completely... when I look back, it was '50s in New York, upper-middle class, it was completely idyllic and golden and wonderful - sweet in every way."
12
"I loved it in the unconditional way that children love their first home."
12
"I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood."
11
"One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around."
11
"Gingerbread houseswith gumdrops and peppermintand marshmallow snow."
11
"The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence."
10
"If we are to use the words 'childish' and 'infantile' as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing. Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire?"
10
"I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships."
10
"Some kids get called 'bundles of joy' or 'slices of heaven' or 'dreams come true.' We got 'the fifty-fourth generation of DNA experiments.' Doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel. But maybe I'm oversensitive."
10
"And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes."
9
"My boyhood saw Greek islands floating over Harvard Square."
8
"The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his tail joined his back-bone."
8
"Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious."
8
"My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero."
8
"When she was little, she'd liked to pretend that stars were really lights anchoring distant islands, as if she wasn't looking up but only out across a dark sea. She knew the truth now but still found stars comforting, especially in their sameness. A sky full of burning replicas."
8
"When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge."
8
"I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus."
7
"And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics."
7
"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."
7
"Ours was not a political household, when I was growing up."
7
"I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy."
6
"Children can create fun out of nothing and when this great talent is lost you become a boring creature which is called adult!"
6
"No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ." "And?" "No damn cat, and no damn cradle."
6
"We were still children and residing in the mosque from morning to evening. We were about to turn into monsters."
6
"I was such a smart kid, I should have figured out that the only way to really get my parents' attention was to disappoint them or fail. But by the time I finally realized that, succeeding was already a habit too ingrained to break."
6
"Because a child is bound to grow, society is intent upon cultivating the child's mind to mature into a very specific type of responsible person. Children take great pleasure in small things that have no practical purpose in their dreamy world where they can be as wild as wind. Each year a part of the child dies, as it is burden with adult responsibilities."
5
"The middle years of childhood arrive just as your own are getting uncomfortably close."
5
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