Quotes about childhood

Death devours not only those who have been cooked by old age it also feasts on those who are half-cooked and even those who are raw.

Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.

We know that childhood and adolescence are the most crucial times for environmental stimuli to affect breast cancer risk, but changes made during adulthood and even after diagnosis still have the potential to create positive changes in the body.

I saw no reason why childhood shouldn't last forever. So I created clothes that worked and moved and allowed people to run, to jump, to leap, to retain their precious freedom.

I never had any childhood, for the word means sunshine and freedom from care. I had a starved and pinched little childhood, as far as love and merriment go.

My childhood memories are amazing I had freedom in every way - but I see everything from a different perspective now that I live outside.

The most important influence in my childhood was my father.

My dad taught me from my youngest childhood memories through these connections with Aboriginal and tribal people that you must always protect people's sacred status, regardless of the past.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

Christ hath instituted Baptism as a bath, to wash away the anger, and hath put into us the Noble Stone, viz. the water of eternal life, for an earnest-penny, so that instantly in our childhood we might be able to escape the wrath.

Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or chicken pox. When a virgin population encountered those pathogens, it ravaged the population, and now they're childhood diseases, and eventually they won't even be that. That's our relationship with bacteria, going through time.

I eventually made the reunion with my father that I'd used as a default daydream throughout my childhood, but by then, we'd both outgrown the only relationship we could have had to each other. I was over 30 by the time I met him again and no longer needed a father.

Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him what he was going to be when he grew up. Of course I expected to hear him say a sailor, a soldier, a hunter, or something else that seems heroic to childhood, and I was very much surprised when he answered innocently, 'A man.'

I have great childhood memories cow-tipping, going off and getting lost in the bog for hours, and coming home covered in dirt.

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.

Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce.

One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.

I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it's easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin' man and the loner.

Promoting healthy lifestyles and encouraging fitness are so important for our children's development and reducing the nation's epidemic of childhood obesity.

children spend their time for they think they have more time adults cry over their time for they see they have less time

Train up a child in the way he should go even when he is old he will not depart from it.

That's the beautiful thing about innocence even monsters have a pocketful of childhood memories with which to seek comfort with.

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...

The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden what is forbidden is to write about it.

It reminded me of how children always thought too big how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old they grow old because they quit playing.

To grow up is to wonder about things to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles it was a miraculous world.

The last time you were happy about nothing the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?

Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones.

It's funny how much of childhood is about proximity. Like who your best friend is is directly correlated to how close your houses are who you sit next to in music is all about how close your names are in the alphabet. Such a game of chance.

Remember when we were children and life was simple how I yearn to return to those days.

Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.

I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that if I didn't exist, the family would be better off. I grew up believing that if I had never been born, things would be easier for the people I loved. (page 35)

Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life - that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower's parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren't alive, their family couldn't function. (page 34)

What better reminder do we have than our kids of our own best selves, our less stressed and more carefree selves? In their silliness we see the echo of the way we used to be: when we were kids, yes, but also before we had kids, or even two weeks ago, before all of the stress of these year-end corporate meetings. Their joy, their infectious enthusiasm, their sense of "mission" as the poor dog is dressed in boxer shorts, cannot help but cajole you, and beckon you, to lighten up.

... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.

The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.

I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up.

There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misun

I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly u

During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid wants to be.

All fathers are liars . . . If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.

The reason any person yaks excessively is because his communication is not being adequately acknowledged. He just keeps trying to be heard.

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.

He was a bad, bad bastard. He abused the privilege of being a cunt, as my old Da would say.’ I smiled, picturing the cozy fireside scene of young son on father’s knee being inducted into the world of abusive epithets.

My mother is European and expresses her love through food and cuddling. She wasn't the type of mother who would make it to school plays or soccer games, but if you wanted to stay at home sick, she was your girl. Whenever you'd go up to her room to cuddle with her, she'd pull out a Kit Kat or Snickers bar from her night table and look at you with dancing eyes.

As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.

A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY

But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents -- or a whole lot of us, at least -- lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father -- or even better, both of them in tandem -- then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence.

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.

You don't have to go back to the way things were. Just go back to the point where you left off. Don't start over... just keep going, but there's a right way of keeping going. And no one here is going to be angry at you for leaving. We all have to leave sometimes. And some of us never come back. But there's always a choice, even if you've already decided never to return. You can still come back from this. That is the only kind of faith that matters. Not in the world, not in...God..., not in our f

Shush – it’s silent time again.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

Peanut butter is the pate of childhood.

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

I remember the pain I felt, and wonder why a man who was such an accomplished liar had to tell the truth that day.

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

And now the bad Mommy was here – outside his window. With a little whimper, he ran back to the bed, jumped in, and pulled the covers over his head.Good Mommy was gone now…and bad Mommy had come to eat him up.

Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely.

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts.

Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

Youngsters deserve no opinions.

People ask me where I got my x-ray powers. I inherited them from my parents in parental supervision. Erase the dots and your doubts if you think that I was 'raysed' alone.

If I'd been a cowboy, it might've ended well.Somewhere on the ramble, I'm sure I'd have to sellMy guns along the highway. My coins to the table To make a gambler's double, I'd double debts to pay.Prob'ly shrink and slink away, It mightn't've ended well.What If I'd been a sailor? I think it might've ended well.From August to MayFor a searat of man drifting through eternal blue, aboard the finest Debris.I might've called the shanties. From daybreak to storm's set, lines stay Taught, over rhythm un

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend’s sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

Capture your youth, while you can.

It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother's face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with h

The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto's shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago he'd been a kid, thinking about his nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and signs. Now he was, heavy, adult.

These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the micro landscapes of their own grazed knees; put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing and they could find their way out without putting a foot wrong. This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams.

Later in the night, Nell brought two of the company mutts up from the stables. It took her almost an hour to find the horses, and more time to find the stall where the dogs had been penned. Then she lost her way coming back through the endless corridors and the mutts tried to bite an Ordinary.Everything is an adventure when you're a page.

Looking at these people now from behind the counter, made her feel like that little girl again, the deprived child that used to press her nose on the glass, peering at things she could never have.

Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.

Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.

I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now.

Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ♥

Ghosts are not what I remember of my childhood; but somehow they infuse memories of myself as a child, the little girl in a storybook, with ghosts hovering around her.

Some people discard their childhood like an old hat. They forget about it like a phone number that's no longer valid. They used to be kids, then they became adults - but what are they now?Only those who grow up but continue to be children are humans.

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

As for children's working off aggressions, I'm against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world. Name one great man in history who did not go boiling and bubbling through childhood with a lashed-down safety valve.

Every summer, like the roses, childhood returns.

But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn't have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclination

I would think of certain winter nights when he wedged himself between Nona and me in bed, a furtive warmth embedded in his skin already tinctured with virginal earth and milk and possibility, or how that peculiar scent common to all small children before the age of five--sunshine sweetened hair, a nascent woodsiness in him exuding youthful exuberance--gripped us, suspended us eighties in the sense that our hope, our very survival, depended on the fulfillment of this child's dreams. How I took th

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seem

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

Looking back into childhood is like turning a telescope the wrong way around. Everything appears in miniature, but with a clarity it probably does not deserve; moreover it has become concentrated and stylized, taking shape in symbolism. Thus it is that I sometimes see my infant self as having been set down before a blank slate on which to construct a map or schema of the external world, and as hesitantly beginning to sketch it, with many false starts and much rubbing-out, the anatomy of my unive

I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren't called turtlenecks, I wouldn't have worn them.

Years later, I remember the waxy taste of the yellow paint, the papery taste of splintered wood, the sharp metallic of the graphite.

Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.