Top 100 Quotes About Childhood
#1. The data show we can do something about upward mobility. Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.
Raj Chetty
#2. My experience in childhood and adolescence of the subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by men had convinced me that I was not cut out to be a wife.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#3. Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game. I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood. I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people.
Steve Busby
#4. Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
George Eliot
#5. O happy childhood! blessed youth! But once we know thy potent power; But once we live all careless free; No cross to mar our love-lit bower.
Pablo Neruda
#6. Life was invented for kids. But then we all grow up, and society imposes filters that block the joy of silliness and sponging up pointless little things that make childhood the magic time for which it is widely known.
Tim Dorsey
#7. 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
#8. Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.
Anthony Marra
#9. The idea that we sacrifice our innate wisdom at the feet of our Guides is really no different from the rigid religious doctrines that talked us out of our childhood spiritual knowing.
S. Kelley Harrell
#10. My childhood was really comfortable and secure, but school was a nightmare. I was a lot taller than the other girls and they called me Gitte the giraffe.
Brigitte Nielsen
#11. That was the way he always was, alien to the existence of his sons, partly because he considered childhood as a period of mental insufficiency, and partly because he was always too absorbed in his fantastic speculations.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#12. I've always been fascinated by the Chinese. This goes a long way back to my childhood. The Chinese invented money, movable type, clocks, and built the largest ships in the history of the world.
Thomas Steinbeck
#13. 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.
Steve Martin
#14. Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.
Samuel Johnson
#15. Childhood is but a frolicking wave in the vast ocean.Can anyone hold it back?
Adyasha Das
#16. Many times, a child's struggle against hunger begins before he or she is born because the mother is undernourished. Making sure prenatal care and proper nutrition are available for expectant mothers in need is a critical part of ending childhood hunger.
Hector Elizondo
#17. Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.
Adam Sandler
#18. Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky's unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky's view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#19. What is it like to fall asleep? What happens? Where do we go? Why don't we remember? Since childhood most of us have wondered about the mystery of sleep.
Henry Reed
#20. I guess I was very fortunate; I had a very very, lets put it this way, I had very wonderful upbringing and a childhood where my parents, of course, exposed us to many cultural aspects, not only of India but other parts of the world.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
#21. Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness later on, but it's never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been bathing in this environment during childhood.
Carlos Ghosn
#22. Childhood's work is learning, and it is in his play ... that the child works at his job.
Caroline Pratt
#23. What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex, while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is robbing children of their childhood.
Phyllis Schlafly
#24. When I look at my own children, Mrs Hargreaves, I think ... I think I know what childhood's for. It's to give us a bank of happy memories against future suffering. So when sadness comes, at least you can remember what it was to be happy.
John Logan
#25. For me I'd say ... a fact that nobody knows about me is that I hate eggs, they gross me out. It's this weird thing from childhood, I don't know what it is, but I just think eggs are disgusting.
Mikey Way
#26. Childhood is not all candy stores and recess; it's frustrations and confusions, too.
Chelsey Philpot
#27. I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#28. If you're walking down the street and you smell a scent, it can take you right back to a memorable time in your life, whether it's a moment with an ex-girlfriend or a childhood event.
Chris Evans
#29. There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.
John Le Carre
#30. Apprehension of a painful or disagreeable recognition made me tremble. I am confident that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a few minutes of the terror of childhood.
Charles Dickens
#31. Breaking childhood teachings is never easy, and in essence, they are like white noise that can sometimes stop us from listening to ourselves, or having to listen to ourselves.
Ramani Durvasula
#32. I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood is ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing - without the traditional interruption of academic training.
Saul Steinberg
#33. I used to anticipate my childhood birthday parties as if each were an annual coronation. Like most kids, I loved sitting at the head of the table with a crown on my head.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#34. I have three children, each of whom is having an idyllic childhood, probably because I have been at the office the entire time.
Stacy Schiff
#35. 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?
Mitch Albom
#36. Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky?
Was there a father?
Or have the planets cut holes in their nets
and let our childhood out,
or are we the dolls themselves,
born but never fed?
Anne Sexton
#37. You know, I'm trying to sometimes sit down and write some stories about my childhood and maybe one when I'm an old lady put them out like a book.
Shelby Lynne
#38. Nostalgia is a longing for home," Svedana Boym writes, "that no longer exists or has never existed." In the 20th century, that longing, she adds, quoting historians Jean Starobinski and Michael Roth, had "shrunk to the longing for one's childhood.
Dan LeRoy
#40. I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well.
Angela Merkel
#41. I was taught from childhood of the sanctity of food. Not a piece of bread could be thrown away without kissing it and raising it to one's eyes as with all things holy.
Attia Hosain
#43. What I have got from my childhood aren't toys, but memories. And happy memories are better than any toy.
River Phoenix
#44. I spent a good deal of time going back over my childhood, my midlife, to try to understand who I was. We're supposed to be complete and whole, and you can't be whole if you're trying to be perfect. Doing a life review helped me get over the disease to please.
Jane Fonda
#45. Few aspects of my work in the DA's Office were more rewarding than to see what I had learned in childhood among the Latinos of the Bronx prove to be as relevant to my success as Ivy League schooling was.
Sonia Sotomayor
#46. For the first time in his life, Roland found himself hating his own childhood. He wished for the size and calluses and sureness of age.
Stephen King
#47. Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.
Jason Reitman
#48. It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.
Yassin Hall
#49. Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
#50. I really don't know but I would quote for a book from JACQUELINE WILSON which is a very interesting book of her childhood.
Jacqueline Wilson
#51. Childhood was fairly solitary. I grew up in a very small town called Navan in County Meath. I never knew my father. He left when I was an infant and I was left in the care of my mother and my grandparents.
Pierce Brosnan
#52. Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul.
Friedrich Frobel
#53. I want my kids to grow up and enjoy their childhood and be carefree. I never really got a chance to be a kid.
Jim Morris
#54. 'Marnie' was ahead of its time. People didn't talk about childhood and its effects on adult life. It was taboo to discuss sexuality and psychology and to put all that into a film was shocking.
Tippi Hedren
#55. 'Dark Shadows' was the spark that lit the fire of my childhood imagination. It wasn't polished; it wasn't perfect. But it gave us characters with real personalities and complicated motivations.
William J. Mann
#56. I would just encourage people: your childhood belongs to you, and don't give anyone, especially me, the power to ruin your childhood.
Colin Trevorrow
#57. I study much, and the more I study, the oftener I go back to those first principles which are so simple that childhood itself can lisp them.
Sophie Swetchine
#58. This is the reality about humanity. We are each born with an evil, God-hating heart. Genesis 8: 21 says that every inclination of man's heart is evil from childhood, and Jesus' words in Luke 11: 13 assume that we know we are evil.
David Platt
#59. Because of my childhood where I was constantly by myself, I always feel lonely. I have a lot of people that I absolutely love and I know love me but I can't get rid of that feeling of loneliness no matter who I'm with - even with my children.
Natalia Vodianova
#60. My mother's brother was killed while clearing mines in 1945. Those are things that mark your childhood and they help explain why we are so devoted to European unity.
Martin Schulz
#61. The goal of early childhood education should be to activate the child's own natural desire to learn.
Maria Montessori
#62. The minds of small children are more interested in clockwork trains, jumping in puddles and other important childhood endeavours.
Maxwell Grantly
#63. It is curious that this man who, even in my childhood, made such an impression upon me, who had such a crucial influence on the whole bent of my mind, and who perhaps has even cast his shadow over the whole of my future, still remains, even now, a complete enigma to me in many respects.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#64. Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from.
Laura Dave
#65. Just as the dweller in this body passes through childhood, youth and old age, so at death he merely passes into another kind of body. The wise are not deceived by that.
Anonymous
#66. Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?
Louis De Bernieres
#67. He's not the Darian of my childhood - the one that played jacks with me on the sidewalk, despite being a year older. Nor is he the Darian who stood up for me when Asher bullied me and called me Carrot Top until I cried.
Shannon Duffy
#68. I followed but I held my tongue. I'd seen children tag after grown men throwing question after question, but I had put childhood aside. My questions could wait, at least until the rain stopped.
Mark Lawrence
#69. Nothing is more foreign than the world of one's childhood when one has truly left it.
Par Lagerkvist
#70. Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.
Erik Erikson
#71. I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.
Susie Bright
#72. I consider myself to have been formed by a lot of the locutions and aesthetics and principles of the Muslim way of life, and those are an important part of my childhood and my identity.
Ayad Akhtar
#73. The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.
J.G. Ballard
#74. My mother really wanted me to be in possibly a beauty pageant, not only for if I could win, but it helped improve my self-image because of trauma in my childhood and other issues.
Pam Grier
#75. I am now writing a book called 'Far Enough,' very loosely based on my childhood. This is difficult because it forces me to remember people I loved who are gone.
Nancy Farmer
#76. Whereas in childhood ... it was the parents' judgement that mattered to the child, later on the situation becomes reversed: it is then that the opinions of one's grown-up children become what matters, as well as their kindness.
Iris Origo
#77. Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
Thomas Szasz
#78. My mum and dad are pretty amazing chefs and they spent most of my childhood cooking really extravagant things for my sister and me.
Jake Gyllenhaal
#79. I was born and raised in Ohio. During my childhood, I spent most of my time drawing and reading fairy tales and myths.
Natalie Babbitt
#80. I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.
Rick Riordan
#82. All of my memories were laced with him; to extract them would mean losing the flavor of my childhood.
Jodi Picoult
#84. They were a motley assembly, each with some cause for anxiety stirring at his heart; though, after all, that is saying little or nothing, for we are all of us in the same predicament through life; each with a fear and a hope from childhood to death.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#85. Smelling a crayon takes you right back to childhood. When I need to go back in time, I put it under my nose and take another hit.
Randy Pausch
#86. Creativity consists in maintaining a key aspect of the experience of childhood throughout one's life: the capacity to create and recreate the world. Creativity is the omnipotence of the child's mind.
Donald Woods Winnicott
#87. I grew up as a really sick kid; I had really bad childhood asthma and was at home all the time in New York.
Josh Peck
#88. I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.
Augusten Burroughs
#89. If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? ... I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and ... toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.
George Orwell
#90. My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, for all the science and sport involved in it.
Vasily Smyslov
#91. There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine you can't be part of the Church.
Garry Wills
#92. The Redskins have been active champions in the fight against childhood obesity through our commitment with the NFL Play 60 program.
Daniel Snyder
#93. I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.
Audrey Niffenegger
#94. Listening to him, I realized how lucky I was not to have had a wonderful childhood. Those who do, or those who peak in their early years, have only that remembered joy or strength to tide them over the rest of their lives. Nothing could ever be as good as that time; for them nothing ever is.
Jonathan Carroll
#95. The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. we can repair ourselves and gain our lost integrity by choosing to look more honestly at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing that knowledge closer to our awareness.
Alice Miller
#96. My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.
Truman Capote
#97. Perhaps, when you leave your childhood behind too early and jump into adulthood, certain parts of you never fully grow up. They just become stunted child parts disguised in a grown-up body.
Angela Hoke
#98. Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.
Pablo Neruda
#99. I don't have many Russian friends. My childhood friends are dead - either from bad health, or they died in perestroika.
Leon Max
#100. I grew up playing football since the day I could walk; some of my greatest memories of childhood are playing touch football in all kinds of weather with my best friends. That's a part of the American experience that no corporation can destroy.
Greg Graffin
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