Leaving Childhood Quotes

#1. There had been no more attacks since those on Justin and Nearly Headless Nick, and Madam Pomfrey was pleased to report that the Mandrakes were becoming moody and secretive, meaning that they were fast leaving childhood.

J.K. Rowling

#2. Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

Joseph Campbell

#3. Nobody was ever really ready to turn off their mother's machine, no matter what they thought; to turn off the light of their childhood and walk away, just as if they were turning out a light and leaving a room.

Fannie Flagg

#4. All you really have...is now.

Laura Wiess

#5. I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#6. 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

#7. The finality of her leaving allowed me to reclaim the places that had once been ours as mine, to say good-bye to my childhood parks and hiking trails rather than grasping for lost moments with a lost girl who refused to be found.

Robyn Schneider

#8. Courage lays within easy reach of a child who knows nothing of how easily understanding can unravel, leaving a set of rules that apply to nothing, and an empty heart.

Sonja Yoerg

#9. What would you do?
Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

Tim O'Brien

#10. Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks.

John Milton

#11. This is the first great problem of modern democracy ... how to get a fair living by reasonable hours of work leaving enough leisure for both childhood and manhood.

John R. Commons

#12. So my sister dances and the dead house burns, and I scrawl these few last words by the light of its burning. I know I should toss this story, too, on those flames. But I am still too much a storyteller -or at least a storykeeper-still too much my father's daughter to burn these pages.

Jean Hegland

#13. Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? Agatha would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.

Sarah Addison Allen

#14. Radio wasn't outside our lives. It coincided with and helped to shape our childhood and adolescence. As we slogged toward maturity, it also grew up and turned into television, leaving behind, like dead skin, transistorized talk-radio and nonstop music ...

Vincent Canby

#15. On things she had to pack before leaving her home in advance of a forest fire, 1996. Childhood pictures and pictures of my life. Do you know how many pictures that is? Not just this life; I have pictures from 13,000 lives.

Shirley Maclaine

#16. As a woman, we all want to feel attractive. We all want to feel that we're making the very best of ourselves so we can accept ourselves.

Gwendoline Christie

#17. When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.

Anna Brownell Jameson

#18. The uncompromising pride of the Third Reich had been broken by the world-wide collaboration of people not avid of conquest, but of freedom.

Miklos Nyiszli

#19. I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger.

Steven Millhauser