Top 100 Quotes About Childhood Growing Up
#2. When it came to my childhood - growing up in a single-parent home, often struggling financially - my mother definitely instilled in me and my siblings this strength, this will, to just continue to survive and succeed.
Misty Copeland
#3. It was a small provincial place with great people and I had a happy childhood growing up in Queens.
Fran Drescher
#4. 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
#5. My childhood growing up in that part of Glasgow always sounds like some kind of sub-Catherine Cookson novel of earthy working-class immigrant life, which to some extent it was, but it wasn't really as colourful that.
Peter Capaldi
#6. 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
#7. At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
Lewis Thomas
#8. I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn't know anymore than I did.
Matthew Quick
#9. Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#10. Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#11. 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.
Crystal Woods
#12. Do you ever plan to grow up, Veltan?" he asked.
"Not if I can avoid it, no.
David Eddings
#13. It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.
William Faulkner
#14. Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone
childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.
Judith Viorst
#15. He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves.
Mark Costello
#16. The monsters were never under our bed, but in the forest our future.
Crystal Woods
#17. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our chilhood behind.
Patrick Rothfuss
#18. Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended.
Floyd C. Forsberg
#19. 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
#20. It doesn't matter. I've moved on from something that was never there to begin with. That's one of the dire things about escaping from childhood. Eventually you grow up and realize the things you wanted when you were young weren't really yours to ask for.
I know that now.
T.J. Klune
#21. A lot of childhood effort, worry, and whispering goes into cracking the codes of adult life. Children have to be accomplished spies.
Vera B. Williams
#22. The phrase 'Boys will be boys,' reflects that a male child is expected to be unpredictable and occasionally troublesome.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#23. Growing up in Poland, I didn't have the experience of going to Disneyland as a child, so I don't have any childhood memories connected to it, good or bad.
Abel Korzeniowski
#24. Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.
Lew Wallace
#25. I wrote about ... my childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.
Sarah Winman
#26. Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.
Roman Payne
#27. I am Peter Pan. He represents youth, childhood, never growing up, magic, flying.
Michael Jackson
#28. Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever ...
Roddy Doyle
#29. It seems like a cliche, but you do grow up a lot faster when you travel a lot, go through things like this interview, spend time away from home and hang around with other actors. It's inevitable that you're not going to have a so-called normal childhood.
Matt Dillon
#30. 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
#32. When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be.
Gever Tulley
#33. Drop the fear. Fear was taken up by you in your childhood, unconsciously. Now consciously drop it and be mature. Then the life can be a light which goes on deepening as you go on growing.
Rajneesh
#35. Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.
Ethan Hawke
#36. Every child should be given the right to grow up and become a productive citizen. This will not happen unless, at the very least, basic food needs are met. Ending childhood hunger should be a national priority.
Pamela Sue Martin
#37. How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?
Miranda Emmerson
#38. I am concerned that my children will grow up sheltered from the public. I am concerned that the children get to experience childhood and youth in their time without constant monitoring. It has been very important for both the Crown Prince and myself.
Mette-Marit, Crown Princess Of Norway
#39. There's slowly been a kind of shift in how we think about childhood. It's like childhood almost extends to 20 or 22 even after the end of college. When I was growing up, there was this expectation that you were on your own now.
Joe Meno
#40. Growing up in the industry, sometimes you can feel as if you're not having a normal childhood, but I feel like my parents involved me with a lot of people who made things as 'okay' as they possibly could.
Keke Palmer
#41. But maybe that was what it meant to grow up and have the seemingly infinite possibility of childhood vanish in an instant. You had to press on, no matter how dark and narrow the path ahead seemed.
Martha Brockenbrough
#42. 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
#43. Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.
Delia Sherman
#44. 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.
Ally Condie
#45. He's completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly.
Rebecca McNutt
#46. The toughest thing for me was growing up and being stared at and being looked at and being talked about in that particular way. Other than that it was a good childhood.
Wilt Chamberlain
#47. Growing up sometimes forces us to confront the distance between our childhood hope and the truth.
Sara Shandler
#48. This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.
Ryu Murakami
#49. And though I had misgiving--obvious ones, too--one overwhelming thing drove me on: on the borderlands, my father would need me as much as I'd need him. That's what made me so blindly ready to go off with him. What boy doesn't wait his whole childhood to walk alongside his father on equal terms?
Peter Geye
#50. It made him wonder if all things taken from their home too soon lost some of their bloom.
Dan Groat
#51. By trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we're just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up,
Lori Gottlieb
#52. To be honest, I've always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad's Super 8 camera. In my mind, it's all one big continuum of filmmaking and I've never changed.
Christopher J. Nolan
#53. By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.
D.K. LeVick
#54. And he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears - a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Allen Ginsberg
#55. No, you become a man when you first decide to put away the things of childhood, the talk of childhood, and the thoughts of childhood. You decide because you cannot be treated as both a man and a boy. Because you are either one or the other, but you are not both ...
Carew Papritz
#56. All roads seem to have come back to Doctor Who in our life. But, no, it was a huge part of my growing up. I was a massive fan and it certainly inspired me to get into acting and to be ... one of those people that tells stories on TV. That was a huge part of my childhood.
David Tennant
#57. I didn't grow up in a Norman Rockwell house ... my house was more akin to Norman Lear.
Michael P. Naughton
#58. 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
#59. They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much.
Alice Hoffman
#60. In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us
not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
John Irving
#61. 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
#62. Growing up, I had a very happy childhood, with two parents who are still very much together.
Kate Winslet
#63. The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.
Rebecca McNutt
#64. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.
George Eliot
#65. I am opposed to the idea of a child growing up with two gay parents. A child needs a mother and a father. I could not imagine my childhood without my mother. I also believe that it is cruel to take a baby away from its mother.
Stefano Gabbana
#66. There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And maybe the cost of growing up was too high.
James P. Blaylock
#67. Childhood anxieties, childhood fears, never disappear entirely. They fade, but not away.
Lauren Bacall
#68. Brushing my little teeth every morning of my childhood, I stood on my tippy toes, leaned over the sink and said to myself that when I am a big girl I will see from this high.
Today I did the same thing, but the view from my toes was the same from flat feet.
I'm a big girl now.
Audrey Regan
#69. The American civil space program is growing to maturity. It has passed through the joys and crises of precocious childhood and now is being called upon to do grown-up things, like earn a living and establish permanent roots in space.
John Noble Wilford
#70. And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the summer and I hear the bees buzzing and for a moment I truly am Alice in Wonderland, do you have the heart to tell me I am not?
John Logan
#71. To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
David Foster Wallace
#72. Growing up in Chadds Ford, Pa., I shuttled between studio space in my parents' house and my grandfather's studio just up the hill. It was a solitary childhood, but I loved it.
Jamie Wyeth
#73. If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.
Thomas Hardy
#74. When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.
Patrick Rothfuss
#76. Growing up, music was an important part of my childhood. I see it being just as important in my children and all children's growth and development, and in a parent's connection with their children.
Ziggy Marley
#77. 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
#78. Growing up in the business you have to grow up very fast - you do have a different type of childhood, that has its benefits and it has its drawbacks.
Jodie Sweetin
#79. It's essential that a part of you not grow up. Childhood wonder gives us our spark and beauty.
Robin Quivers
#80. I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy.
Anita Diamant
#81. Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
Thomas Nagel
#82. The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents' house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#83. Summerhill children are allowed to go through their gangster period, and consequentially more furniture is destroyed.
A.S. Neill
#84. I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.
Clive Barker
#85. Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up.
Simone De Beauvoir
#86. 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.
Lauren Groff
#87. In a way, I had a very good and normal childhood. I had loving and caring parents. But I had a lot of quirks or problems when I was growing up. I had phobias and obsessions.
Elyn Saks
#88. On some days she was able to see both sun and moon at the same time. Like feuding cousins, they hung in two corners of the vast world-ceiling refusing to look at one another. The moon was always harder to spot and more faded, but it was there if you looked, as many things were.
Carla H. Krueger
#89. Growing up with the childhood that I had, I learned to never let a man make me feel helpless, and it also embedded a deep need in me to always stick up for women.
Christina Aguilera
#90. When Uncle W. G. held out his hand to take my money, I dropped the dead mouse in his hand.
Earl B. Russell
#91. 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
#93. For if we try to go on protecting them we prevent them from growing up to be ordinary, confident adults, capable of looking after themselves.
Dorothy Rowe
#94. She knew him in that way you can only know a person as a child. Like if you cracked away the adult shell, you'd find that child, happily sitting inside, smiling at you.
Sarah Addison Allen
#95. She tried so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all.
George R R Martin
#96. They have, and bring with them, that upper-body strength. They have apparently developed that in their childhood and growing up, and they've further advanced in that regard.
Daryl Gates
#97. 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
#98. The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.
Sara Novic
#99. You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.
Charles Baxter
#100. The danger of growing up surrounded by endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.
Bee Wilson
