Childhood Quotes

“I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet. Have you ever seen a baby bouncing up and down in the crib in time to some music? When you think of it, some of that baby's first messages from his or her parents may have been lullabies, or at least the music of their speaking voices. All of us have had the experience of hearing a tune from childhood and having that melody evoke a memory or a feeling. The music we hear early on tends to stay with us all our lives.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.”
― Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

“Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ♥”
― Susan Branch

“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.”
― Ryū Murakami, 69

“Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that, too, but I wouldn't understand why. I would site there with the tight elastic thread of the birthday hat parting the pudge of my underchin, with the grainy frosting of the cake bluing my teeth, and I would try to figure out why it was fun.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?”
― Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories

“One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? -- that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? -- that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit?”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words have been the source of the pain and the way to heal. Struck as a child for talking, for speaking out of turn, for being out of my place. Struck as a grown woman for not knowing when to shut up, for not being willing to sacrifice words for desire. Struck by writing a book that disrupts. There are many ways to be hit. Pain is the price we pay to speak the truth.”
― Bell Hooks, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life

“Being a child is such a shining gift, yet we don't know how precious it is until it's worn out and gone away.”
― Storm Constantine, Thin Air

“Somehow, the days of summer with their glimmering enchantment of dancing ladybugs and sailing clouds had faded into grey. Maddie’s heart had somehow faded with it.”
― David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness

“To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life of the child grows out of the life of the parent or as a plant grows out of the soil, but a time and state of consciousness to be left behind, to cut oneself off from ... The child may be joyous, the man must be sober and self-denying; the child may be free, the man is to be "responsible"; the child may be candid in his feelings, the man must be polite, restrained, mindful of the demands of convention; the child may be playful, the man must be industrious. I am not necessarily objecting to the manly virtues, but I am objecting that they should be so exclusively assigned to grownups, and that grownups should be so exclusively restricted to them. A man may have all the prescribed adult virtues and, if he lacks the childhood virtues, still be a dunce and a bore and a liar.”
― Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound

“They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except "Do you have enough room in the toes?”
― Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
― C.M. Stunich, Losing Me, Finding You

“No matter where you came from, there was something, someone out in the world or under the bed that frightened you as a child. The dark shapes that lurked on the edge of the world, the ones you knew were real because even adults feared them -- because the adults had grown up fearing them.”
― Erin M. Evans, Lesser Evils

“Childhood is this time of magic and monsters; hoping for one and fearing the other... The worst part of being a kid is discovering which one exists... So, I chose to believe in magic.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows

“It's remarkable the logic we'll build around a misapprehension.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone.”
― Bell Hooks, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life

“There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“My father used to say that when he was growing up the water was clear and there were tons of fireflies everywhere... He felt sorry for the kids growing up today... But it is really beautiful... Time will just keep on passing... we'll get old... and look back on the past. I hope we can always say... how great things were.”
― Fuyumi Soryo, Mars, Vol. 10

“You make me thirsty, Promethea, my river, you make me eternally thirsty, my water. As if I had spent my life in an old house of dried mud, so dry myself that I could not even thirst, until yesterday. And suddenly yesterday, the dusty floor of my old house burst open and while I was still dozing away my parched existence, drop by drop I heard the music of coolness awaken the thirst under my dry soul. And leaning over the dark shaft of my life, I saw my childhood springs unearthed. Is that always how (by accident) we rediscover Magdalenian riches?”
― Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea

“And children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.”
― Rilke Letters to a Young Poet

“In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm clouds in the offing somewhere over Grantchester....Barrett's afternoonishness was far more supple and engaging. It superimposed the hippie cult of eternal solstice on the pre-teatime daydreams of one's childhood, occasioned by a slick of sunlight on a chest of drawers....His afternoonishness is lit by an importunate adult intelligence that can't quite get back to the place it longs to be....Barrett created the same precocious longing in adolescents.
"I remember 'See Emily Play' drifting across a school corridor in 1967...and I remember the powerful wish to stay suspended indefinitely in that music...I also remember the quasi-adult intimation that this wasn't possible.

[from the London Review of Books for January 2, 2003]”
― Jeremy Harding

“En sevdiği oyuncağıydı. Neydi? Kırmızıya boyanmış, ufak, tahta bir kuş. Kırmızıydı, gerçekten öyleydi; tam da gün ışığında, gölgede, mumlarla, şöminenin başında ona bakan bir oğlan çocuğunu hayallere daldıracak, parlak, tatlı bir kırmızı. Ama muhabbetkuşu ya da öyle değersiz bir tür olduğunu sanmayın. Hayır, onun kuşu bir baykuştu.”
― Jesse Ball, Samedi the Deafness