Quotes About When I Was A Child

#1. Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

Thomas Traherne

#2. When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[ ... ].

Simone De Beauvoir

#3. When I was a child, my father taught me to put up my fists like a boy and to be prepared to defend myself at all times.

Camille Paglia

#4. 'Mosaic' is about what we see and what we don't see. I learned how people can develop other senses to compensate for a missing one when I was a child. My best friend, Carol, who is profoundly deaf, saved me from an approaching car that she 'heard' when I didn't.

Gayle Lynds

#5. On winter Sundays when I was a child, we waited for my father to return from his tennis game with bagels and sturgeon and for my mother to object when the 1 P.M. Giants game began.

Jane Leavy

#6. When I was a child, the FA Cup was one of the crown jewels of the sporting year, along with the Grand National, Wimbledon and The Open. But with every announcement it seems to lose another piece of its identity. First it was sponsors added to the name, followed by the semi-finals at Wembley.

Gary Neville

#7. When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.

P.L. Travers

#8. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

1 Corinthians 13 11

#9. I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.

Alan Bennett

#10. When I was a child, kids used to make fun of me because I was blind. But I just became more curious, 'How can I climb this tree and get an apple for this girl?' That's what mattered to me.

Stevie Wonder

#11. When I was a child, I was always nicking my mum's jewellery to wear, and I loved to drape a massive Chinese shawl around me from our fancy-dress box. I was obsessed with a feather and rabbit-fur collar from the age of three and attempted to make one with my friend, whose father was a gamekeeper.

Alice Temperley

#12. It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

Paulo Coelho

#13. Before I really even understood what the term meant, I wanted to be wealthy. I wanted to be able to drive the beautiful old Rolls-Royces my father admired when I was a child.

John Caudwell

#14. Once my brother was very angry on my parents and told them "You should have killed me when I was a child"
Interestingly I was present and told him "I don't think it is still too late" and I have never heard him complaining about life.

M.F. Moonzajer

#15. Nine to Five is actually one of my favorite movies. I watched it a thousand times when I was a child, literally a thousand times.

Leslie Mann

#16. When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

A.S. Byatt

#17. When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British.

Michael King

#18. By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.

Thomas Wolfe

#19. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was a child. I did want to be a cartographer but that was partly because I liked Ordnance Survey maps and when I used to go to my grandparents' house from Southampton Station one went past the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey.

Jonathan Meades

#20. Interviewer (Louise Tucker): What did you want to be when you grew up? Have you always wanted to be a writer?
IllumBerg: When I was a child I was busy being a child. [...]

Natasha Illum Berg

#21. In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.

Suzanne Farrell

#22. I am quite spiritual. I believed in the fairies when I was a child. I still do sort of believe in the fairies. And the leprechauns. But I don't believe in God.

Helen Mirren

#23. When I was a child, the temptation to sin was always a romantic option. This romantic option led me to the cinema, a place where sin was welcome.

Harmony Korine

#24. Sometimes I have a tough time getting along with myself. When I was a child, I needed a lot of attention ... and I don't have a small ego. For me, appearing on a stage or presenting a cake is the same thing. You need a crowd around you to do it.

Ron Ben-Israel

#25. When I was a child I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.

Alice Walker

#26. Even when I was a child, I always wanted to be older. I realised just in time that it's a mistake and to enjoy my youth while I had it.

Mark Gatiss

#27. When I was a child, we used to look forward to the end of the day when we would hear another ten minutes of a story.

Malorie Blackman

#28. I always felt there was something wrong with me, even when I was a child, a discomfort with my own being. I had an urge to be mean to people. I was too shy to do it properly but now I know the reasons for the faults in my character. I'm the devil.

Rhys Hughes

#29. When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said - and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded - 'It's like hair color. It's nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It's not a subject.' This was a very healthy attitude.

Karl Lagerfeld

#30. I'd rather be known for my accomplishments, and for things that I really do take pride in, rather than known for this doll-like image I had when I was a child.

Mara Wilson

#31. I love Arthur Rubinstein, especially his live recordings. I think his Chopin Mazurkas, his interpretation of the Polonaises, and the Concertos of Chopin are just incredible. When I was a child, I wanted to play more and more Chopin because of his recordings.

Rafal Blechacz

#32. When I was a child, life felt so slow because all I wanted to do was get into show business. Each day seemed like a year, but when you get older, years pass like minutes. I wish there was a tape recorder where we could just slow our lives down.

Bruce Forsyth

#33. I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.

Maurice Sendak

#34. What I saw when I was a child was my father who was a pilot, and because of circumstances was thrown into the political system, and all I saw when was small after my grandmother died was my father in constant - constant combat with the system in India, and then I saw him die, actually.

Rahul Gandhi

#35. When I was a child, my December weekends were spent making cards, decorating the tree, hanging the wreath and preparing brandy butter and peppermint creams.

Pippa Middleton

#36. I just want not to be hurt by him. I want it to be like it was when I was a child, when you thought the day you got married you lived happily ever after.

Fay Weldon

#37. When I was a child, Mama had the best voice of all the members of the church. She had loved to sing. Her words had soared like an angel's over the swells of the organ. In fact, I now suspected, her entire theology had been taken from the hymnal.

Siri Mitchell

#38. When I was a child, there were not that many vaccines. I was vaccinated for polio. I actually got measles as a child. I got pertussis, whooping cough. I remember that very well.

Anthony Fauci

#39. I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.

Gore Vidal

#40. When I was a child I did engage in an arduous struggle to pass: learning English, getting rid of my accent, becoming conversant with the culture in all its large and small aspects.

Luc Sante

#41. I've had such a hard time with dyslexia my whole life. When I was a child, I didn't learn to read until I was a lot older, and I was behind in my classes; it was such a challenge.

Charlotte McKinney

#42. When I was a child? Only the nostalgia for those days of utter, absolute irresponsibility, now long gone. But for her (and this she would never have admitted to anyone), those days weren't gone at all. She still felt totally irresponsible.

Francoise Sagan

#43. I have loved filmed from when I was a child, but I never considered it as a future career.

Chika Anadu

#44. Adults sometimes think children don't think. That's what propels them to order children around. But children do integrate thoughts and make sense of them. When I was a child, I thought about everything in the universe.

T'Keyah Crystal Keymah

#45. When I was a child I accidentally made a chemical bomb. I also ate my grandfather's heart pills. I got my stomach pumped for that one. I got over that so by the time I hit my teens I was kind of mild. Now I'm like an old lady who occasionally parties real hard.

Brittany Howard

#46. In my case, I got hit a lot by bullies when I was a child, and so I naturally bristle against anybody who abuses power. And that seems to make me rather persistent when it comes to exposing the abuse of power.

Nick Davies

#47. When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

E.B. White

#48. When I was a child I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I have ever dreamed has come true a thousand times.

Elvis Presley

#49. I moved around a lot when I was a child; two of the houses I grew up in have totally disappeared. One was burnt in a riot, and the other was pulled down.

Toyin Odutola

#50. When I was a child I had something called Perthes' Disease which meant I was on crutches, so I was bullied at school and all that sort of stuff.

Antony Beevor

#51. My family said that I wanted to act even when I was a child living on a tea plantation in the jungle in India.

Julie Christie

#52. I wouldn't want to play a normal princess who always walks around in nice dresses. I never had a connection to it when I was a child, I preferred playing with plastic soldiers.

Kristen Stewart

#53. When I was a child I had a best friend who lived across the road from me. When her mother died unexpectedly it was like losing a member of my own family. I think I am still affected by the memory of that loss.

Margaret Mahy

#54. When I was a child, all I wanted was to enter the Austrian team and to compete on the World Cup tour. I had to fight hard to reach this. I wanted badly to win each race.

Hermann Maier

#55. We live in a reward-centered society. When I was a child, my father used to say, "It's not whether you win or lose but how well you play the game." I used to think that was about sports, but as an adult, I realize what I create, do, etc., is more important than winning a prize.

Renee Lawless

#56. When I was a child I devoured every book I could get my hands on. I loved losing myself in colourful and dramatic stories - and my absolute favourite was 'Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.' Everything about it electrified me, and when I re-read Roald Dahl's books as an adult it surprised me.

David Walliams

#57. When I was a child of four I wasn't really drawing like a child, I wasn't sketching as a child. I would sketch and I was using perspective, the good relationship of the subject.

Arman

#58. The fact that my parents got over to Canada is kind of amazing in and of itself. Had they not immigrated when I was a child, I probably would have never been doing what I'm doing. So, thanks, Canada!

Daria Werbowy

#59. When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France. Many of you have been there, and many have not. But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place.

Josephine Baker

#60. When I was a child, I saw in the news that a person from Belitung had done well in sports in Jakarta, and I just couldn't imagine that it was possible for someone from here to become famous, and it's still very isolated out here.

Andrea Hirata

#61. Love requires an Object
But this varies so much
Almost, I imagine
anything will do:
When I was a child I
Loved a pumping engine
Thought it every bit as
Beautiful as you

Wystan H. Auden,

#62. When I was a child actor, I had the fear that I was going to be cast as the tree.

Vin Diesel

#63. When I was a child, our summer days were spent swimming; chlorine in my hair was like perfume to me.

Patti Davis

#64. The scriptures were one of the ways God spoke to me - even when I was a child - about my needs, my situation, and my life. They still are. Since our needs change over a lifetime, God has different things to tell us at different times.

Henry B. Eyring

#65. When I was a child, I understood the things of my childhood. Now that I have grown into a man, I understand less of the world than I did as a lad.

Joel T. McGrath

#66. When I was a child, if someone had talked to me about buying water, I would have thought it was a joke.

Assata Shakur

#67. When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.
But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.

Bonnie Greer

#68. I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.

Rita Dove

#69. When I was a child, I used to paint intently. The older I become, and the closer death approaches, the brighter my life gets day by day.

Yayoi Kusama

#70. When I was a child, I used to cry all the time.

Gwen John

#71. Not many people know this about me, but I'm a natural blonde. My hair went from light blonde naturally to a darker kind of blonde. My mother dyed my hair dark when I was a child, as I loved the look then. So I'm basically a natural blonde.

Angelina Jolie

#72. When I was a child I didn't care about getting an education, and I didn't finish high school.

Mary J. Blige

#73. I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.

Anne Lamott

#74. When I was a child, I lived in Morocco, and I would always buy a lot of beads from the markets and to make jewellery for friends. Later, at 18, I would do my own clothes and make my own patterns. When I first came to New York, people just assumed I was a stylist because I was so into fashion.

Maripol

#75. When I was a child, it was cool to be a scientist.

Michio Kaku

#76. When I was a child, I went to stage school three times a week in the evenings - singing, ballet, tap, modern and acting, and I loved it.

Michelle Dockery

#77. When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same.

Boris Becker

#78. I definitely don't write with any kind of 'message' or 'lesson,' probably because when I was a child, I used to run a mile from books like that.

Michelle Paver

#79. When I was a child in the Navy during World War II, I was perennially grateful to the armed services libraries for having on hand a good supply of those pocket books, which were so common in that period. I must have read a couple hundred of them, and they did a lot to save my sanity.

James A. Michener

#80. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, thought as a child, behaved as a child. But when I became a woman, I put away manly things.

Gregory Benford

#81. When I was a child, I dreaded blindness. We used to ask: 'Would we rather be blind or deaf?' I said I'd rather be blind, even though I was scared of it. I couldn't bear not being able to hear music or talk to people.

Sue Townsend

#82. I love music and I enjoy creating sounds. I got into making music when I was a child, starting with the spoons and the koto before moving onto the piano.

Tobe Hooper

#83. When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.

Maggie Stiefvater

#84. I grew up in Rome, in actually what I would say was a liberal, open-minded family. My father was an architect and my mother was a teacher of art history, so it was sort of intellectual, and maybe a bit much for me when I was a child.

Frida Giannini

#85. When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Pablo Picasso

#86. I think classical music tuition is, well, was when I was a child, was an abomination. I think in some ways it is one of life's great tragedies for everybody who gives up an instrument.

Hugh Laurie

#87. I had the worst birthday party ever when I was a child because my parents hired a pony to give rides. And these ponies are never in good health. But this one dropped dead. It just wasn't much fun after that. One kid would sit on him and the rest of us would drag him around.

Rita Rudner

#88. There are certain realities we must speak of with our children that were not present when I was a child.

Gloria Estefan

#89. I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.

Anthony Browne

#90. I saw a lot of haute couture all my childhood, and without knowing it I've learned from when I was a child to recognise beautiful fabrics.

Ines De La Fressange

#91. When I was a child, we always had wine on the table, no matter how simple the meal. The wine had no special identity; it was just 'the wine,' from the cellar cask. The rules were general: white with the first course, red with the main course.

Jacques Pepin

#92. I always knew I was brainy. It struck me when I was a child that I wanted to be an adult because I never felt I belonged among children whose minds were so much simpler than mine.

Maximillian Degenerez

#93. [NINA]
When I was a child I stayed wide awake
Climbed to the highest place
On every fire escape
Restless to climb

I got every scholarship
Saved every dollar
The first to go to college
How do I tell them why
I'm coming back home?

Lin-Manuel Miranda

#94. When I was a child, I wanted to ... go into space! To go to Mars. I wanted to explore and explore and explore. I wanted to go to the Lost World in South America - I was heartbroken to discover there were no dinosaurs; I still don't accept it.

Brian Blessed

#95. When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage.

Mario Batali

#96. When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either.

Peter Ackroyd

#97. When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.

Nathaniel Branden

#98. When I was a child, I liked to create. I was told by many I was unique. I liked that word. I liked how it was spelled and I liked how it sounded on my lips. At a young age, I decided I wanted to be that. It helped that I had the right personality for it.

Lindy Zart

#99. I used to say to my auntie, 'You throw my fu*kin' poetry out, and you'll regret it when I'm famous,' and she threw the bast*rd stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fu*kin' genius or whatever I was when I was a child.

John Lennon

#100. I came to Southbury because I wanted to live a more simple life. When I was a child, I saw lots of movies about happy people living in Connecticut. And ever since then, that was where I wanted to live. I thought it would be like the movies. And it really is. It's exactly what I hoped it would be.

Polly Bergen