Childhood Quotes

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured lawns. She would have in tow one or two slower-footed, sari-clad young Indian nuns. We thought her a freak. Probably wed picked up on unvoiced opinions of our Loreto nuns.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

We remember childhood as the fabulous years of our lives, and nations remember their childhood as fabulous years.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

The most wonderful thing in life is to do something for a child because they're children for such a short time. We can't allow ourselves to let them live a miserable childhood.

Since my childhood I learned that to understand the world we need to go further and take the risks of sailing in unknown seas.

I had a very rough and tumultuous childhood. I often wish that I had the opportunity to make my own choices in life and choose my own path. But at the same time, I realize that things happen the way they're supposed to.

I had a somewhat frenetic childhood because my mum and dad split up when I was five, and then my mum remarried.

At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.

Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London.

My main source for faith-based stuff is mostly the Bible, and a childhood with a much, much higher-than-median exposure to theological thought.

I didn't have the worst childhood, but I didn't have the best, and when you grow up like that, you have certain limitations invariably stuck inside you. Slipknot was a way to work it out.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

I have been luckier than anyone I know or even heard of. I had a very happy childhood, a good education, I enjoyed working as a teacher, journalist and author. I have loved a wonderful man for over 33 years, and I believe he loves me, too.

I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether its with Africa or childhood.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

The way in which we manage the business of getting and spending is closely tied to our personal philosophy of living. We begin to develop this philosophy long before we have our first dollar to spend; and unless we are thinking people, our attitude toward money management may continue through the years to be tinged with the ignorance and innocence of childhood.

I would come, many years later, to understand why To Kill A Mockingbird is considered an important novel, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.

I carry a disposable camera. It takes me back to my childhood, when you had to develop your film and wait to see what pictures you got.

My childhood was very difficult. I had every childhood disease and then some, but my parents didnt mollycoddle me. They left me to fight those battles on my own. I guess that was very Canadian, very stoic. But its good. I had to become a warrior. I had to give up hope and find a substitute for hope that would be far more stable.

What I use from my own life is not the facts, it's the emotion. It's how I felt about something. It has nothing to do with facts at all. You can get those anywhere. It's the feelings of childhood that you need to know.

All memories fashioned at the level of a child's eye were unreliable in scale.

Childhood is supposed to be happy, and if you can't remember yours with any happiness, what hope have you later, when life starts handing you fresh grief?

I dont remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

My childhood was very gregarious, and I was usually surrounded by close family.

I don't have any friends from my childhood because I didn't stay at one school for very long.

I think I spent my whole childhood diving out of haylofts with my BB gun and coming out shooting.

Thou hast her, France; let her be thine, for we Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see That face of hers again. Therefore be gone Without our grace, our love, our benison.

I had a very tough childhood. I came here from Italy in the '70s and didn't speak a word of English, so the kids at school tormented me. Truly, it was horrifying the names they called me, and the teachers never really did a thing to stop it.

What a childhood I had - I was ten years old when I found out Alpo was dog food.

You get to relive your childhood when you have a baby and you see these toys and these books you read when you were little - the innocence that you are able to maintain because you have to find that again in order to connect with your child keeps you in a special state of mind.

I had envisioned doing comedy since childhood. For sure.

I was the class podiatrist. I never made it to class clown. I wasn't funny enough. I would examine feet and prescribe and ointment. It was a sad childhood.

When you write for children and young adults, you have much more affect and influence on them than when you write for adults. The books that get us through our childhood stay with us for life.

since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

Childhood is never troubled with foresight.

A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child's questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won't be able to related them in a way which would enrich the child's life.

From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the Civil War, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s.

When you saw the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," that was Michael [Jackson]'s story write large. Born as an elderly person, Benjamin Button was, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and in the film starring Brad Pitt, he dies as a newborn child. Michael Jackson's childhood was one of enormous, prodigious production.He was a child prodigy, he was a wunderkind.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

What a childhood I had. Once on my birthday my ol' man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away.

Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others' reasons for action, or the basis of others' emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers.

I have always believed in the magic of childhood and think that if you get your life right that magic should never end. I feel that if adults cannot enjoy a children’s book properly there is something wrong with either the book or the adult reading it. This of course, is just a smart way of saying I don't want to grow up.

I have always believed in the magic of childhood and think that if you get your life right that magic should never end.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

I have the students for six hours a day. The community has them for 18 hours, plus prenatal and early childhood. I don't believe the schools create (the achievement gap), but our responsibility is not to add to it. We won't eliminate the gap until the community makes education a priority, but the schools can't wait for the community to do its part.

I rarely think about my childhood. It's a slippery thing I can't keep hold of for long - it slithers out of my grasp. And a lot of the time I remember what was missing instead of what was there. I am a chronicler of absence.

My childhood was not an episode from Downton Abbey