Quotes About Childhood

the late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood ...

It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his child's heart, and then his child's heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world.

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

Children have to grow into their imaginations like a pair of oversized shoes.

I know that the thing under my bed doesn't exist. But I also know that if I keep my feet under the blanket, it won't grab my ankle

The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

Everybody likes the ice cream man.

They float, they all float... and when you're down here with me, fat boy, you'll float too.

They'll float, it growled, they float, Georgie, and when you're down here with me, you'll float, too-

I don't think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.

What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be

What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

it's the stories of our childhood that make the deepest impressions and last the longest.

It was strange how some of childhood's words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed.

In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.

For me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.

I think most kids have a place they go to when they're scared or lonely or just plain bored. They call it NeverLand or The Shire, Boo'ya Moon if they've got big imaginations and make it up for themselves. Most of them forget. The talented few - like Scott - harness their dreams and turn them into horses.

Has it ever occurred to you, he said abruptly, that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming? I shook my head. Tell you what I think, he said, I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

Perhaps kids really did come into the world trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth had so confidently proclaimed, but they also shit in their pants until they learned better.

When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.

He felt awe as he looked up at those stars, but also a deep and abiding contentment, such as he had felt as a child, awakening in the night, safe and warm beneath his quilt, drowsing half in and half out of sleep, listening to the wind sing its lonely song of other places and other lives.

I remember that I wanted to kill It,' Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voice.