Quotes About Childhood

I can remember only a small handful of instances in which I talked about politics with my parents. I remember my parents telling me that Daniel Ellsberg was a hero when I was six years old.

It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.

To your parents you are still that innocent baby, and sometimes even you will need your father's hand and your mother's lap.

Children observe everything with caution.

All of us were once children, but only some of us remember that

I was eight years old and scared, and had no idea what was going on

The child has a mind able to absorb knowledge. He has the power to teach himself.

. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.

I've always been an animal lover. I've grown up with dogs my whole life. I think that is what helped me get the role on 'Lassie', I was comfortable around the dog, where many of the kids were afraid or intimidated by Lassie.

even the stay-at-home mothers subjected their kids to a kind of benign neglect back then.

Almost all the earliest conversations I remember with my parents were about books:

Ishmael Beah's memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone.

If you would ask my mom what books I liked growing up, I liked Dr. Seuss.

And I made a rural pen,And I stain'd the water clear,And I wrote my happy songsEvery child may joy to hear.

Piping down the valleys wild,Piping songs of pleasant glee,On a cloud I saw a child,And he laughing said to me:"Pipe a song about a Lamb."So I piped with merry cheer;"Piper, pipe that song again."So I piped; he wept to hear.

When my mother died I was very young,And my father sold me while yet my tongueCould scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

Young children are developing more of an artistic orientation, and the orientation they develop is so naturally graceful and lively that many great artists have said that they constantly try to recapture it.

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around–and why his parents will always wave back.

Exactly, what form this alteration has taken. I will never know. I don't feel sedated, jittery or drugged. I simply feel normal-as if I had been driving a car all these years with the parking brake on, and now it is off. I feel as if the real me has returned, perhaps all the way from childhood, where she lived before The Beast arrived.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed? Childhood is a lie of poetry.

when I was a little boy and learning letters — A ..., B ..., C ..., love was never taught to me, I couldn't spell it, the O was always missing, or the V, so I wrote love like live, or lure, or late, or law, or liar.