Childhood Books Quotes

#1. I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.

Sally Mann

#2. These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

Peter Straub

#3. I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention.

Damon Galgut

#4. With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

Abraham Maslow

#5. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

Neil Gaiman

#6. Malacca fascinates me more and more daily. There is, among other things, a mediaevalism about it. The noise of the modern world reaches it only in the faintest echoes; its sleep is almost dreamless. Its sensations seem to come out of books read in childhood.

Isabella Bird

#7. Since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

Joan Aiken

#8. There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

Marcel Proust

#9. On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.

Marcel Proust

#10. My childhood wasn't easy. I buried myself in books. I guess I'm a recovering book addict.

Katherine Reay

#11. What I most hate is the books and films and all other stuff which all the time end in happy end, do you hate it...
It's better to be in happy and...
- After all I wanted to show the taste of the real world, a injury in father's childhood, then injury when his wife dies...

Deyth Banger

#12. My favorite of my books is DAVE AT NIGHT, because it's loosely based on my father's childhood in an orphanage.

Gail Carson Levine

#13. I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn't understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once.

Terry Pratchett

#14. For a long time, I kept an eye out for element eighty at school and in books, as you might watch for a childhood friend's name

Sam Kean

#15. I'm a big 'Star Wars' fan and grew up watching the movies. I read all the books and have read 'Star Wars' fiction that went between the newest trilogy and the original trilogy and it was part of my childhood.

Jared Padalecki

#16. If you don't remember childhood and you idealize it, you can't write books for kids because they're not real. Kids pick that up.

Robert Munsch

#17. There's a different flavor to children's literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

Mizuki Nomura

#18. 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.

Marcel Proust

#19. Children's and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that's why so many adults read YA: we're never done coming of age.

Betsy Cornwell

#20. The books you read in childhood shape the person you become.

Paula Berinstein

#21. Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories!

A.B. Guthrie Jr.

#22. Only in childhood do books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life, we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already.

Graham Greene

#23. My parents were wonderful people, but there were terrible rows between them, and at times I found the atmosphere at home unbearable. The Arthur Ransome books gave me an alternative childhood and the tools to escape.

Michelle Magorian

#24. I had a happy childhood, with many stimulations and support from my parents who, in postwar times, when it was difficult to buy things, made children's books and toys for us. We had much freedom and were encouraged by our parents to do interesting things.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

#25. I asked myself what it was that I wanted from writing and where my connection with books began, and the answer to that question was definitely in childhood, because that's where my connection with reading began.

Rebecca Stead

#26. At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

Alberto Manguel

#27. Even if he was happier in Asia than he'd been in Latin America, the wanderlust still worked on my father's insides like a disease. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is of him sitting in his armchair in the evenings, poring over atlases the way other fathers read newspapers or books.

Scott Anderson

#28. It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

Maureen Corrigan

#29. Throughout my childhood, my parents dropped me off at a multitude of therapists' offices in hopes that I'd avoid growing up to be the kind of asshole who writes books about them. Also because it was sometimes easier than finding a nanny.

Jenny Mollen

#30. The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.

Bruno Schulz

#31. While there are other parenting books with insight into childhood, Parenting from Your Heart goes a step further, showing parents how to put theory into practice with their own child in a realistic, compassionate and effective way. This book is worth its weight in gold!?

Jan Hunt

#32. The verbal patterns and the patterns of behavior we present to children in these lighthearted confections are likely to influence them for the rest of their lives. These aesthetic impressions, just like the moral teachings of early childhood, remain indelible.

Esphyr Slobodkina

#33. There is no ME without books; they're everything I remember from childhood, from maturity ... All that's happened to me has been coloured, permanently, by my reading.

Spencer Gordon

#34. I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.

Patti Smith

#35. When you write for children and young adults, you have much more affect and influence on them than when you write for adults. The books that get us through our childhood stay with us for life.

O.R. Melling

#36. From childhood on, I found many of my angels in favorite authors, writers who created books that enabled me to understand life with greater complexity. These works opened my heart to compassion, forgiveness, and understanding.

Bell Hooks

#37. It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.

Virginia Euwer Wolff

#38. Quite often somebody will say, 'What year do your books take place?' and the only answer I can give is, in childhood.

Beverly Cleary

#39. Most of the books I remember from my childhood were Dr. Seuss-type books. They were fun to read, but there wasn't a real story behind them.

Tony Dungy

#40. The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

Antonia Fraser

#41. I was attacked by a dog when I was a toddler, and my injuries were so bad, I spent quite a bit of my childhood in and out of hospital. Books were absolutely my salvation during those years.

Kate Forsyth

#42. someone like him, is the island of exile where most teenagers go to wait until childhood becomes adulthood. What you need to see - what Rothstein finally saw, although it took him three books to do it - is that most of us become everyone.

Stephen King

#43. 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.

Dean Koontz

#44. I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams.

Halldor Laxness

#45. Recently, I've really responded to books that bring the magic of childhood back to us as adults.

Christina Ricci

#46. Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#47. Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.

E.B. White

#48. Childhood is just this amazing place, and in my books, I was trying to express my concern about childhood being eroded. You have kids' TV programs being interrupted by terrorist attacks, and kids are exposed to so much these days.

Alexandra Adornetto

#49. The truth is that I can't remember a moment when I didn't want to be a writer. From childhood, I loved books, I loved stories and I loved writing my own

John Boyne

#50. People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.

Adriana Trigiani

#51. I had absolutely no trauma in my childhood. If anyone ever assumed that my books were autobiographical, they'd be sorely disappointed, because none of these things happened to me.

Jodi Picoult

#52. The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

Lewis Buzbee

#53. The women in the room chatted about love, about childhood, about losing parents, about Mr. Spock, about good books they'd read.
They mothered each other.

Louise Penny

#54. I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that.

Anthony Bourdain

#55. It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard.

Dionne Brand

#56. I think there is something barbaric in children, and it's missing in lots of books for them because we don't like to think of it. We want them to be happy [but] childhood is a very tough time.

Maurice Sendak

#57. My brother and I spent our childhood in movie theaters screaming. I decided early on that that was the epitome of entertainment. I'm always trying for that same level of adrenaline in my books.

Tess Gerritsen

#58. There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

Adam Ross

#59. To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood

Tushar Upreti

#60. I prefer to write books for children instead of reading them. But I do strongly believe in childhood and in respecting childhood innocence. I don't like books for children that deal with adult themes.

Philip Kerr

#61. I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. i already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.

Kurt Vonnegut

#62. We believe in books. Somehow we want to make childhood better, and we believe that a book given at the right moment can work magic in a child's life.

Ann Schlee

#63. Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?

Thomas Traherne

#64. I held up the book - Green Eggs and Ham - and began reading. I smiled; it was one of my favorite books from my childhood.

Angela Graham

#65. Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books.

Samuel Johnson

#66. I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.

Jeff Kinney

#67. So I had nothing to distract me from my books and their other worlds that swallowed me whole, from Narnia to the Wisconsin woods, from a small town in Sweden to the red earth of Prince Edward Island. Nothing and no one interested me as much as my books.

Luisa Weiss

#68. For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.

Gene Luen Yang

#69. I think after all I found a feature which is incredible and kind of mein or let's say it something which is part of my childhood in the Jack Ketchum Novels and films.

Deyth Banger

#70. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around.

John Lennon

#71. Dad always explained the car engine when he repaired it, and he had many technical books, so I was making electromagnets by age eight as well as reading my mother's medical and nursing books. I suspect I was born with a boundless curiosity, and this was encouraged through my childhood.

Barry Marshall

#72. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.

Betsy Hearne

#73. My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#74. Some of the best memories of my childhood that I have are the times that I played hooky from school so I could spend my days in the public library reading all the wonderful books at my disposal.

Woody Allen

#75. Every book has it's destiny, Like a human life , Sometime when an Author is dead the destiny of the book begins" The days of Childhood !!!!!

Tushar Upreti

#76. What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.

Sarah Jio

#77. I still feel childlike. Not childish - there's a difference. But to be childlike is to be savoured and treasured. I offer my books to those who like the things of childhood; the challenges, intrigue, joy and fun.

Graeme Base

#78. As a kid, I went to the library because, in books, there were people really living lives, and unlike my parents, they talked to me about important things.

Gregory Sherl

#79. Some people are fond of horses, others of wild animals; in my case, I have been possessed since childhood by a prodigious desire to buy and own books.

Julian The Apostate

#80. Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or temples, or churches or books, are only the supports, the help of his spiritual childhood.

Swami Vivekananda

#81. You get to relive your childhood when you have a baby and you see these toys and these books you read when you were little - the innocence that you are able to maintain because you have to find that again in order to connect with your child keeps you in a special state of mind.

Idina Menzel

#82. The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.

Edward Hirsch

#83. I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.

Maurice Sendak

#84. The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

Donna Tartt

#85. One of the most important things in my childhood were the new books that came in. I feel sorry for kids today who have so many other options like television that they may not value books as much as they could enjoy them.

Jean Fritz

#86. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#87. Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work.

Rashid Johnson