Childhood Quotes
1,087 quotes
"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."
"Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood."
"If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter."
"[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are."
"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."
"I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway... let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves."
"Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets."
"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."
"Gym should be illegal. It's humiliating."
"Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul."
"and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful."
"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose."
"Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God."
"One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep."
"Play is the highest form of research."
"That's what makes it so right. Your eyes—your soul is there, but the rest of you is still so undefined. That's the beauty of childhood. The eyes show everything you've seen so far, but the rest of you is still so open to possibility, to whatever you might become."
"My parents are going to kill me!""That seems rather harsh..."
"It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless."
"Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul."
"As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded."
"No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a leg blown off, and for days, even weeks after it happened, they could still feel the arm itching, the leg itching, the mother calling."
"(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours."
"Whatever I learned,Whatever I knew,Seems like those faded years of childhood that flew,Away in some dilemma,Always in some confusion,The purpose of this life,Seems like an illusion!"
"In silence the three of them looked at the sunset and thought about God."
"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."
"People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile."
"Misery is a scar on the soul, that if it begins in childhood, it lasts the whole lifetime. I understand that no two scars are alike, but I also ask myself; even if these scars are not alike, aren’t these things engraved on our souls signed by which we know each other?Aren’t we also alike?"
"Each month is gay,Each season nice,When eatingChicken soupWith rice"
"When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."
"You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic."
"I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen"
"School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible."
"There is much that I do not know and I'd like to know even less."
"High school will probably be better. I mean, some kids will still be jerks, but it's not so bad if you have at least one good friend. Someone who gets you."
"This is part of the answer to the riddle ofchildhood unhappiness: their minds need, and deserve, a whole world of utterly unfenceable freedom where everything has othering, everything is radiant with the possibilities ofelseness."
"Fear? I never saw fear. What is it? It never came near me."
"Those gobblers [the French]?- I detest them."
"I didn't go to school until I was 11. On your own you develop imagination."
"As I get older I realise that start has made me rather, well, different. It set down a tremendous template for the rest of my life. I grew up believing the piano is a great instrument because you can play everything on it."
"My education was very intensive and I applied that training later on to playing the piano. I had always played, but having no one to compare myself to, I had no idea if I was any good."
"I can see it must seem strange, but to me it was normality. Really, my memory of my childhood is that the sun always shone and I spent all my time playing in the park. Since then I've discovered that some of the great musicians I admire - Charles Ives, John Cage, even Bob Dylan - had quite unconventional childhoods." Evening Standard - 04/07/2002"
"Not only was I fiddling around at the keyboard but there were all these other children of all backgrounds wanting to play every sort of music bits of classical, jazz, pop, improvisation." The Guardian - 26/05/2000"
"School was strange, rather amusing - with a teacher standing at the front telling you what to write. The camaraderie was interesting. I tend to remember the things you can't recreate on your own - queuing up for your dinner, learning team games, which were a complete mystery to me. I remember having to pretend I knew how to play hockey, that kind of thing." The Mail on Sunday - 06/02/2000"
"What was most odd was that teachers would tell you what to do and what to think and they would write everything on a blackboard and you would copy it all down." The Evening Standard - 04/07/2002"
"I wasn't part of that hothouse thing. I didn't go to the Yehudi Menuhin school. I grew up with the idea of trying to make music available to people of all abilities." The Guardian - 26/05/2000"
"I'm trained quite classically but quite freely by my mum, so even when I was little, I had this rather freewheeling approach. When I trained more seriously in my late teens at college, it was: here are the notes, here is what is expected of you. I didn't mind because you need technique, particularly on the piano, which requires a lot of stamina. And it was natural that once I had done that, I would want to go beyond classical music. How can you be yourself if all you do is reproduce someone else's notes?" The Guardian - 05/10/2001"
"I used to do Grade Exams, but my mum will tell you I didn't over-practise for them at all. I never practised, just played. I loved to play. I loved to play a lot* If one mistake is made with young children, it is trying to make them practise rather than just letting them play.' She played hymns at church ('My parents were very religious when we were young') and 'all the Top of the Pops number ones next morning at school. Things like David Bowie's "Life On Mars". That's got a very good piano part. And ever since I was six or seven years old, I always liked Bach - that's why I recorded the Anna Magdalene Notebook, little 16-bar preludes that Bach wrote for children.' I was amazed at how serious the other kids were about the whole thing, much more disciplined than I was, and with this attitude of "Ooh, I can't play sports because I might hurt my fingers" or "I can't listen to pop music because that's really terrible."
"I was given so much advice. About how my hair should be, what I should wear, which competitions I should enter, what stuff I should play. None of that was relevant for me. I just had a kind of instinct."
"I've played Bach since I was a little girl. I can't let a day go by without playing him. He's so witty and secretive and funny and mathematical and brilliant."
"Making up for lost time?""Yes," I say. "A lot of things were stolen from my childhood. Lots of important things. And now I have to get them back." "In order to keep on living."I"
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