Quotes About Childhood

Well, you know what grown-ups are,' said Dinah. 'They don't think the same way as we do. I expect when we grow up, we shall think like them - but let's hope we remember what it was like to think in the way children do, and understand the boys and the girls that are growing up when we're men and women.

La angustia que transmite todo atisbo de demencia le va dejando perdido en una deriva extraña por el peligroso barrio infantil que hay en los límites de su mente, allí donde sabe que en cualquier momento puede perderse para siempre.

if it weren't for the fact, ladies and gentlemen, that I never go to the movies. Indeed, I've never even been inside a cinema, not even when I was a child, when it was fashionable to spend Sundays in one of those dark places.

When circumcising an infant child, the circumciser is as far from Jesus' Golden Rule as they can be.

Everyone carries his parents around inside of him.

Cowboy: 'Come and see the barn.' Visitor: 'I've loved barns ever since I was a little girl.

Raising" children is primarily a matter of teaching them what games to play. Different cultures and different social classes favor different types of games, and various tribes and families favor different variations of these. That is the cultural significance of games.

A variant of "Psychiatry" is "Archaeology" (title by courtesy of Dr. Norman Reider of San Francisco), in which the patient takes the position that if she can only find out who had the button, so to speak, everything will suddenly be all right. This results in a continual rumination over childhood happenings.

It is not difficult to deduce from an individual's position the kind of childhood he must have had. Unless something or somebody intervenes, he spends the rest of his life stabilizing his position and dealing with situations that threaten it: by avoiding them, warding off certain elements or manipulating them provocatively so that they are transformed from threats into justifications.

Ever since I was very young, as far back as I can remember, I have loved making pictures. I knew even as a child that, when I grew up, I would be an artist of some kind. The lovely feeling of my pencil touching paper, a crayon making a star shape in my sketchbook, or my brush dipping into bright and colorful paints — these things affect me as joyfully today as they did all those years ago.

But I did go to music really early on, even when I was 4 or 5, I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.

Early in my childhood, when I was about six or seven, I began to get the feeling that there was something different about me.

When things began to go badly wrong between me and Alice, I had a terrible fear that getting attached to an upper-class girl like her was part of a childhood resentment, connected to my feelings about my mother, to bring down women, and that deep inside I was thinking, "Here's an Ormsby-Gore, and I'm going to make her suffer.

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

If one of the best ways to appreciate life is to have an unhappy childhood, I was very fortunate.

Joe trotted beside his father, who walked quickly. He was thinking that he would never be able to understand why grown-ups were so hard-hearted just when you needed them most.

Western definition of adolescence, as we'll soon see, does align remarkably well with the biblical definition of childhood.

Children seem to need, then, a delicate balance between the realistic and the fantastic in their art; enough of the realistic to know that the story matters, enough of the fantastic to make what matters wonderful

My parents moved to American Samoa when I was three or four years old. My dad was principal of a high school there. It was idyllic for a kid. I had a whole island for a backyard. I lived there until I was eight years old and we moved to Santa Barbara.

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.

Manches, was man als Kind erlebt hat, erhält seinen Sinn erst nach vielen Jahren. Und vieles, was uns später geschieht, bliebe ohne die Erinnerung an unsre Kindheit so gut wie unverständlich.

Alt ist, was man vergessen hat. Und das Unvergeßliche war gestern. Der Maßtab ist nicht die Uhr, sondern der Wert. Und das Wertvollste, ob lustig oder traurig, ist die Kindheit. Vergeß das Unverglißliche nicht! Diesen Rat kan man, glaub ich, nicht früh genug geben.

Wie kann ein erwachsener Mensch seine Jugend nur so vollkommen vergessen, dass er eines Tages überhaupt nicht mehr weiß, wie traurig und unglücklich Kinder bisweilen sein können. Es ist nämlich gleichgültig, ob man wegen einer zerbrochenen Puppe weint oder weil man, später einmal, einen Freund verliert.

The identity crisis… occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood.