Quotes About Childhoods

#1. All of us wish we'd had perfect childhoods, with a mother and father who modeled ideal parental attitudes and taught us to internalize the tenets of self-love. Many of us, however, did not.

Marianne Williamson

#2. Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#3. Let us become the first generation to decide to be the last that sees empty classrooms, lost childhoods and wasted potential

Malala Yousafzai

#4. People who have fabulous childhoods have this sense that nothing is ever going to be that good again. With me, I have the sense that nothing is going to be that bad.

Nigella Lawson

#5. All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

Mitch Albom

#6. I'm aware of what kids like because I'm constantly in touch with them. Also, they say that a lot of people who write for children can remember their own childhoods vividly and I can remember my childhood very vividly.

Eric Wilson

#7. We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

Jon Ronson

#8. I am thrilled to write 'The Treasure Chest,' and to bring to life not only the childhoods of famous people from history, but also the characters of Maisie and Felix, who I hope you will fall in love with just as I have!

Ann Hood

#9. One of the reasons I get so much joy out of my own children's childhoods is that I'm having my first childhood myself.

Al Sharpton

#10. I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn't.

Anthony Shadid

#11. Because of my mother, who gave me definitions, I knew what I was committed to in life ... I had the most satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.

Kay Boyle

#12. I've been writing an ongoing letter to my children since they were born, full of recollections of their childhoods. I've filled two journals. It's a great thing to do as a mother - you forget a lot as you go along, but reading over what you've written brings all the memories back.

Tory Burch

#13. People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

John Le Carre

#14. I think sometimes when our childhoods are difficult, we forget that there's also a lot of joy.

Brad Goreski

#15. I think if everyone would write down the funny stories from their own childhoods, the world would be a better place.

Jeff Kinney

#16. Defending the library service from the predations of ideologically-motivated public schoolboys who had immensely privileged childhoods isn't 'whining,' it is the pursuit of passionately held beliefs.

Alan Gibson

#17. We go to school for twelve or more years during our childhoods and early adulthoods, and then we're done. But when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning.

Thomas L. Friedman

#18. Oddly-shaped is a term I've been using because it doesn't sound better or worse than anyone elses. All those other terms like "f**'ed up childhood" or "broken home," none of them sound good. Were our childhoods better or worse? I don't know. It's different.

Bucky Sinister

#19. Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Michael Herr

#20. The geographies of our childhoods don't quite suit either of us, something we have in common.

Rachel Friedman

#21. On Michael Jackson and child stardom: He had one of the worst childhoods ever. I think I had the second.

Elizabeth Taylor

#22. Back when childhoods were often so protracted, it is unsurprising that so many people got into the lifelong habit of believing, even after their parents were gone, that somebody was always watching over them - God or a saint or a guardian angel or the stars or whatever. People

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#23. What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?

Dan Simmons

#24. What no one tells the young is to be careful of their childhoods. The memories from those days are the most compelling paintings in the mind
to which, with nostalgia or dread, you must ever return.

Gregory Maguire

#25. I wasn't against becoming a dad: I'd had a good childhood, as childhoods go, and as role models, my imperfect parents were as good as or better than most.

Michael Redhill

#26. Healthy parenting is especially challenging when our own childhoods weren't healthy. It requires energy, attention, and constant restraint. Realize that you need healing. Take time out to nurture yourself.

Vimala McClure

#27. My mom grew up in Kansas, my dad in Indiana. They had boring childhoods.

Hunter Parrish

#28. Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not.

Ian McEwan

#29. It's hard to say. Sometimes people have had terrible childhoods. And sometimes they just haven't found their special place in life. And sometimes they're dogs from hell and must be destroyed.

Charles Addams

#30. This is a book that respects kids and their ideas. And in that regard, it places Chasing Vermeer in the tradition of classic favorites fondly recalled from our own childhoods.

Elizabeth Taylor

#31. Athletes don't have much use for poking around in their childhoods, because, introspection doesn't get you anywhere in a race.

Lance Armstrong

#32. Giving homeless children the chance to be educated, giving them this ticket to their futures, is so wonderful. They will have the chance to not repeat the suffering of their childhoods in their own families. They can build secure and safe lives for themselves and their children.

Laura Bush

#33. Travelling childhoods are a common theme among actors. Army kids, embassy kids, travelling salesmen, clergy. Thing is, you learn about behaviour, that different places are separated by behaviours which are culturally driven.

Julianne Moore

#34. The most important element of the foster care system is getting kids out of foster care and into a permanent placement so they don't have to spend their entire childhoods in courtrooms, wondering if they will ever have a place to call home.

Rhea Perlman

#35. I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we'd vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.

Gabriel Basso

#36. The fragile and ancient hurt that seeps out of adults when they speak
of wronged childhoods.

Martin Roper

#37. I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen

Marisa De Los Santos

#38. Part of my evolution has been to learn how painful most people's childhoods are. They grow up not liking themselves, not loving themselves. Ask people if they were lovable the minute they were born, and watch them sit back and have to think about it. One lady said, 'I suppose so.' That's painful.

Bernie Siegel

#39. Let's raise children who won't have to recover from their childhoods.

Pam Leo

#40. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse ...

J.G. Ballard

#41. And this is what we called our childhoods. Little more than a dress rehearsal for adding our digits to the butcher's bill of war.

Stefan Molyneux

#42. Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.

James Hillman

#43. Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

James Hillman

#44. My parents were not perfect, but no one's parents are. As childhoods go, mine was pretty comfortable and good in a lot of ways, and yet I still ended up with anxiety.

Scott Stossel

#45. A lot of people do have tragic childhoods. But you know what? Get over it.

Phil McGraw

#46. None of us had normal childhoods," Sloane said quietly. "If we had, we wouldn't be Naturals.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

#47. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#48. What we did in our childhoods makes us who we are now.

Jon Heder

#49. War and tooth enameled
salted lemon childhoods
All colors run, none of us solid
Don't look for shadow behind me
I carry it within
I live cycles of light and darkness

Suheir Hammad

#50. Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

Paul Auster

#51. But I suppose our childhoods are seeds inside of us that plant roots forever, even when we're certain their life cycles have long since been extinguished. How long will it take for my own roots to loosen their grip?

Allison Winn Scotch

#52. Psychology doesn't like to talk about evil. It likes to talk about bad childhoods. But I very much believe that some people are evil and motivation is not necessary for evil.

Laura Schlessinger

#53. We all have two childhoods, the unhappy one and the happy one.

William Matthews

#54. Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.

Romesh Gunesekera

#55. Don't we all look back in longing, those of us who had happy childhoods? Because the greatest loss we ever know is not the loss of family or place or money, it is the loss of innocence. There is forever a hollow place in our hearts once we realize that darkness rings the campfire.

Carolyn Hart

#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. It's very surreal. It seems like everywhere I go, people always talk about 'Indiana Jones,' and I realized over the years it has made a huge impact on their childhoods ... I feel very fortunate to be a part of this.

Jonathan Ke Quan

#58. You'd be surprised how many childhoods each of us has.

David Rivard

#59. It is true, even people with painful childhoods ... grow up to be more interesting people. So, there's always a positive to a negative.

Barbra Streisand

#60. People from the most horrendous of childhoods can have good lives, but it comes down to a very seemingly simple word. 'Choice.'

Laura Schlessinger

#61. Whackos like Liberty Association belong in jail. I don't care if they're misguided or had bad childhoods. We've all got problems; we don't all try to kill people we disagree with.

Clancy Nacht

#62. They say the luckiest people are the ones with happy childhoods.

Nina Wirk

#63. their childhoods. How ridiculous to think there was some

Robin Lee Hatcher

#64. I was such a sullen, angry, sad kid. I'm sure there are writers who have had happy childhoods, but what are you going to write about? No ghosts, no fear. I'm very happy that I had an unhappy and uncomfortable childhood.

Isabel Allende

#65. It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.

Ayelet Waldman

#66. What if we never 'get over' certain deaths, or our childhoods? What if the idea that we should have by now, or will, is a great palace lie? What if we're not supposed to? What if it takes a life time ... ?

Anne Lamott

#67. Sometimes all we need to do to forgive our parents is to understand their own childhoods.

Karen White

#68. I've often observed that men and women who were young children during these years [of defeat in war] have a certain seriousness about them; there was too little laughter in their childhoods.

Arthur Golden

#69. As Korn go on, it's the same things - bad childhoods and mean moms. It gets too old after a while. How old is Jonathan? Thirty? How long has it been since he lived with his parents?

Chino Moreno

#70. Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#71. I didn't remember much partisan division in Kansas when I was growing up. People here had been more mainstream then. A strong current of practical common sense and reasonableness had run through both Ward's and my childhoods. We recognized it in each other.

Julene Bair

#72. One thing that is almost always said to me is, I grew up with you. They are meeting me and feel that they actually grew up with me. I was with them during their play hours and thinking hours. I was a part of their childhoods. That's one of the most amazing things.

Mark Goddard

#73. by the light of Gypsy fires, my sister and I came of age way too soon

our childhoods were swept away

Roo Bardookie

#74. A priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves you and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as a high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.

Anne Lamott

#75. The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse; because the government needs abuse victims as enforcers.

Stefan Molyneux

#76. We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them ...

Thomm Quackenbush

#77. Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck.

Gary Shteyngart

#78. How bloated we all are to think that our childhoods matter, that anybody really cares about our little lives.

James St. James

#79. I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

Joseph O'Neill

#80. On some level, with its carrousels and castle and cowboys, its mysterious jungle and its animated characters, Disneyland is a highly idealized elaboration of our childhoods. It can be seen as a portal through which we revisit (maybe even heal) our youth.

Leslie Le Mon

#81. Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.

Robert Crais

#82. But since a person's deepest fantasies were formed by their more or less screwed up childhoods, it made sense that anything based on them would end up in betrayal.

Shannon McKenna