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Childhood Quotes
"I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one."
21
"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."
21
"Well, when I was 13, for my bar mitzvah I received my first typewriter. And that was special."
19
"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."
19
"The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence."
19
"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."
19
"I loved it in the unconditional way that children love their first home."
19
"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."
18
"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."
18
"My Christmas was a sum total of the ministrations of adults, usually adults who wanted me to encourage my parents to buy something for me to consume and discard."
17
"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."
16
"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."
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."
15
"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."
15
"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."
15
"I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships."
15
"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."
15
"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."
14
"I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus."
13
"My boyhood saw Greek islands floating over Harvard Square."
13
"Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young."
13
"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?"
13
"And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics."
12
"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."
11
"The middle years of childhood arrive just as your own are getting uncomfortably close."
10
"Little Alice fell d o w nthe hOle, bumped her head and bruised her soul."
10
"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."
8
"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."
8
"Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel."
8
"Ours was not a political household, when I was growing up."
8
"When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, 'Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.'"
8
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