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Childhood Quotes
"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."
9
"What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?"
9
"The happiness of childhood, the calming of a child's fears and the healthy development of its self-confidence depend directly upon love."
9
"Babies do not want to hear about babies, they like to be told of giants and castles."
9
"All children are born rebels and explorers until they're taught to sit still and obey."
9
"My mother would say, 'Why are you always playing alone?' And I would say, 'I'm not playin', Ma. I'm fuckin' serious!"
8
"One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again."
8
"When children are taught to be "good" and keep everyone happy, it teaches them that they have the impossible burden of being responsible for other people's happiness."
8
"For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief-how could they ever be other than what they are?"
8
"His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master."
8
"Only children believe they're capable of everything."
8
"Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us."
8
"Grown-ups love figures. When you talk to them about a new friend, they never ask questions about essential matters."
8
"Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things."
8
"Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences."
8
"Kids don't have much accumulated and deep memories and that's why they happily live in the present time!"
8
"I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations."
8
"Magrat liked to think she was good with children, and worried that she wasn't. She didn't like them very much, and worried about this too. Nanny Ogg seemed to be effortlessly good with children by alternately and randomly giving them either a sweet or a thick ear, while Granny Weatherwax ignored them for most of the time and that seemed to work just as well."
8
"Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us."
8
"For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe?"
8
"Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about."
8
"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."
8
"In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss."
7
"A child thinks twenty shillings and twenty years can scarce ever be spent."
7
"Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence."
7
"While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights."
7
"Though the children did not know Levin well and did not remember when they had last seen him, they did not feel towards him any of that strange shyness and antagonism so often felt by children towards grown-up people who 'pretend,' which causes them to suffer as painfully. Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it."
7
"I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old."
7
"Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children."
7
"Many of the things that grownups have chosen to ignore, the child understands deeply."
7
"There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help."
7
"The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there."
7
"When I was your age, if a boy behaved badly, one simply scored his name out from one's dance card.(Sadie Lancaster - to Lara Lington)"
7
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