Top 100 Old Childhood Sayings
#1. I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood.
Gordon Parks
#2. When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called 'The Childhood of Famous Americans.' In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.
Ann Hood
#3. And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.
Maya Angelou
#4. What a childhood I had - I was ten years old when I
found out Alpo was dog food.
Rodney Dangerfield
#5. To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl;
Elizabeth Gaskell
#6. Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
Charles Lamb
#7. There was an undercurrent of poverty throughout my childhood. We lived with my grandmother in her two-bedroom flat, and I slept with my parents. We had cheap holidays, I had to save for my bike and get a paper round as soon as I was old enough.
Bernard Hill
#8. In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.
Socrates
#9. A born-again Christian should no more think of going back to the old life than an adult to his childhood.
Billy Graham
#10. Lenny's face was smiling, too. For a minute they were both ten years old. Time travel in real life.
Lynne Rae Perkins
#11. I had a very turbulent and painful childhood, like many people. I left for college when I was 16 years old and up until that point I'd lived in five different family configurations. Each one ended or changed through a death or some terrible loss.
Sharon Salzberg
#12. I do have to wonder what sort of childhood the Grimm brothers endured. They are not a merry bunch of storytellers, what with their children roasted by witches, maidens poisoned by old crones, and whatnot.
Libba Bray
#13. Sweetheart,' 'darling,' 'luv.' I like these words; they fit me like a comfortable old pullover. I remember them from childhood; that's what innocent little boys were called by cheerful aunties back then, to make them feel welcome and secure in the world.
Michael Leunig
#15. One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless
heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man.
C.S. Lewis
#16. 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.
Craig Russell
#17. One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.
Isabella Bird
#18. To the end of her life, to the last dream of old age, Syeira would always remember these two wild smells-the Arva horse, the muddy river-and how they carried her out of a lonely childhood.
Jamieson Findlay
#19. The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
Christopher Morley
#20. I had a lot of chaos in my very early years before I was old enough to know what was going on, and then I just skated through the rest of my childhood without dealing with it.
Jeremy Sisto
#21. Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.
C.M. Stunich
#22. 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
#23. Despite being what would now be called a deprived child in a one parent family, I did not grow up with an urge to smash windows or to bash old ladies over the head in order to steal handbags.
Eva Hart
#24. A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.
Pindar
#25. I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.
Sherman Alexie
#26. Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.
Lydia M. Child
#27. I have three best friends in this world. What's surprising is that they also happen to be your (audience) three best friends. They are Bachpan (childhood), Jawani (Youth) and Budhapa (old age).
Kishore Kumar
#28. Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them - certain traits, certain places where you don't let the world go.
Johnny Depp
#29. I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Charles Lamb
#30. Exhilaratingly new and unmistakably familiar, like a childhood memory that felt dreamlike until photographic evidence was found in an old box in the attic.
Lauren Kate
#32. There the old Eskimo hunters she had known in her childhood thought the riches of life were intelligence, fearlessness, and love. A man with these gifts was rich and was a great spirit who was admired in the same way that the gussaks admired a man with money and goods.
Jean Craighead George
#33. Since I'm a cat who doesn't know what I am, I wear track pants with old-skool Nikes but Gina Lollobrigida skintight sweaters. I am caught between childhood and va-va-voom.
Emma Forrest
#34. When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.
Elie Wiesel
#35. The childhood years are the best years of your life ... Whoever coined that was an unmitigated fuckwit, a bullshit artist supreme. Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course.
Keri Hulme
#36. Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life.
Leo Tolstoy
#37. An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered.
Bayard Taylor
#38. From very early on in my childhood - four, five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny, and I didn't look like anybody else, I didn't even look like any member of my family.
Patti Smith
#39. This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time, the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it.
Sere Prince Halverson
#40. To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him.
Thomm Quackenbush
#41. Simple old-fashioned values that come from a sense of community are the key to a great society. I believe we all have that sense from childhood memories, when life was simple. It's those memories that should drive us to reflect on our values.
Lindsay Fox
#42. I have no intention of inflicting all my childhood memories on anyone. Far less do I want to excoriate my old teachers who, in their bungling, unforgettable way, exposed me to the natural world, a world covered in chitin, where implacable realities hold sway.
Annie Dillard
#43. I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.
Orson Welles
#44. All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.
George Eliot
#45. 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
#46. I want to be six years old again - just for a day.
It's not that things were so much better back then. They sucked.
But I was the kind of kid who knew how to laugh about it all.
That's what I want. I want to laugh.
Jaye Murray
#47. My dad worked all sorts of jobs when I was growing up and finally ended up as a surveyor; my mum delivers meals to old folk around where we live. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, but I had a very happy childhood.
Michelle Dockery
#48. This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel ...
Mikhail Bulgakov
#49. It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
Margaret Mead
#50. I had a series of childhood illnesses ... scarlet fever ... pneumonia ... Polio. I walked with braces until I was at least nine years old. My life wasn't like the average person who grew up and decided to enter the world of sports.
Wilma Rudolph
#51. I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.
Michael Chabon
#52. Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.
Jose Rizal
#53. True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.
Sophie Swetchine
#54. Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.
Will Self
#55. O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!
Virginia Woolf
#56. People who've had happy childhoods are wonderful, but they're bland ... An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief. That's the gift you're given.
Sue Grafton
#57. He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves.
Mark Costello
#58. My childhood was kind of complicated. I have an older sister, but my father, my mother's husband, died when I was four years old. So I only had my mum and sister, really.
Orlando Bloom
#59. Freedom, in childhood, may be the right to be totally self-centered. ... But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years.
Joan D. Chittister
#60. You cannot act in the old way, as you got used to, as you have been programmed in your childhood, you will have to change yourself or otherwise you will not survive
Sunday Adelaja
#61. All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.
Marya Hornbacher
#62. My daughter loves stories about my childhood, and we both love discussing women's issues. She's a wise and mature ten-year-old.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#63. Didn't we, like our grandchildren, begin with a childhood we thought would never end? Now, all of a sudden, I'm older than my parents were when I thought they were old.
Lois Wyse
#65. Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.
Henry Williamson
#66. A fat old man has disturbed my day, coming to tell me that he has sold my childhood to a museum in Cincinnati.
A.M. Homes
#67. I never felt more free in this world, than when I was five years old
Jeremy Aldana
#68. ... because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.
Alan Bradley
#69. Very few old folk are happy, Irina. Most of them are poor, aren't healthy, and have no family. It's the most fragile and difficult stage of life, more so than childhood, because it grows worse day by day, and there is no future other than death.
Isabel Allende
#70. I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.
Alan Hovhaness
#71. 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.
Erick Kastner
#72. In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.
Herman Melville
#73. I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
Sylvia Plath
#74. I had a very outdoorsy childhood. I was athletic and used to ride and do dressage. I could ride almost before I could walk. There is a picture of me at 18 months old sitting happily on the back of a donkey.
Alison Jackson
#75. Twelve is the border between childhood and old.
Lindsay Eagar
#76. It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#77. Spring is childhood, summer is youth, autumn is maturity, and winter is weariness and waiting. But with spring youth returns, no matter how old we are.
Toni Sorenson
#78. But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die
Elif Shafak
#79. You see yourself as if old and wise.
I see you really miss your childhood.
Toba Beta
#80. What a childhood I had, why, when I took my first step, my old man tripped me!
Rodney Dangerfield
#81. They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.
Maud Hart Lovelace
#82. Their suburbia house in Brentwood was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need.
Joan Didion
#83. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.
Ray Bradbury
#84. Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know that you're avoiding them.
Jodi Picoult
#85. It started when I was eight years old. I first heard the cello on the radio, and I loved the sound. It was such a magical, beautiful sound. I dedicated my entire childhood to cello, practising like crazy.
Stjepan Hauser
#87. A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
Ian McEwan
#88. Ambition was the old dream of his youth and childhood, a dream which he did not confess even to himself, though it was so strong that now his passion was even doing battle with his love
Leo Tolstoy
#89. My attitude goes back to my childhood. I used to audition for theatrical roles, and you can't stand out in a room full of ambitious eight-year-old girls by acting the wallflower. I realised then that I couldn't do things half-heartedly.
Jessie J.
#90. Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!
Charles Dickens
#91. When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.
Sam Ewing
#92. I don't need him to comfort me or tell me it's okay.
I can make it okay, myself.
Maybe that was what happened when you faced the very worst thing in the world.
She'd lost her family and her old life and maybe even her childhood, but she'd found herself.
And that would have to do.
L.J.Smith
#93. My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.
Rick Bass
#94. Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?
Dick Cavett
#95. I am much more powerful today than the old programs and mind viruses that I absorbed in my childhood.
Wayne Dyer
#96. In childhood, we yearn to be grown-ups. In old age, we yearn to be kids. It just seems that all would be wonderful if we didn't have to celebrate our birthdays in chronological order.
Robert Breault
#97. Resting on the roots of this old oak I lean back against his knotted trunk, shine my granny smith on my sleeve And ponder the days ...
Kellie Elmore
#98. Some one has said of a fine and honorable old age, that it was the childhood of immortality.
John Wolcot
#99. I have passed out of childhood into old age. I have had no youth - no womanhood; the hopes of womanhood have closed for me - for I shall never marry; and I anticipate cares and sorrows just as if I were an old woman, and with the same fearful spirit.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#100. Sum of life; Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, parenthood, old age and death.
Lailah Gifty Akita
