Quotes About Childhood

Some children like how-to-do-it or all-about-everything type books, but I suspect parents like them best because they look so educational. These really should be in a separate category because they don't usually classify and literature but are more nearly manuals of information. Paul Hazard suggests that instead of pouring out so much knowledge on a child's soul that it is crushed, we should plant a seed of an idea that will develop from the inside.

Every child needs to see the possibilities of being human, watch the consequence of choices, and have their hearts stretched by goodness and courage in action.

Little girls are twice as precious and innocent as little boys. I do not know a culture that does not make them that way.

Whatever was lacking within him that made it impossible to confront the difficulties of life could not be supplied with words. She saw it now. There was a void in his being that had been padded and cushioned over the years, and now that covering had grown impregnable. She bit on her bottom lip and swallowed back a sob. God had given her what she prayed for—a little boy who would always need her.

Do you know there's such a thing as Tater Tots? Back in Happy Valley, they told us we always had the very best, but we didn't have Tater Tots. Another Osiris lie.

I used to call my dad. The surge of emotion is so raw that it's all I can do to hold back tears. One look at him and I'm six years old again, and he's hugging me and stroking my hair the way he did when I was upset. I was living a lie back then, but at least I was happy.

We used to think that schools built brains. Now we know that it is play that builds the brains that school can then use.

What to us looks like independence is really just dependence transferred. We are in such a hurry for our children to be able to do things themselves that we do not see just how dependent they really are. Like power, dependence has become a dirty word. We want our children to be self-directing, self-motivated, self-controlled, self-orienting, self-reliant, and self-assured. We have put such a premium on independence that we lose sight of what childhood is about. Parents

Our society is so topsy-turvy that we may actually come to value the child's willingness to separate more than her instincts for closeness. Unfortunately, we cannot have it both ways. Parents whose young children are not properly attached face a nightmare scenario just keeping the child in sight. We should be thankful for the assistance attachment provides

There were few comforts to console them during this endless labor. Masters fed their slaves as little as possible, because food cost money. Children usually didn't have real clothes. Instead, they wore rough, itchy sacks with holes cut out for their heads and arms. Harriet

Harriet was put in charge of taking care of her younger brothers and sisters when she was only four years old.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

it is almost as though someone in those vast spaces is trying to communicate a message of good will, for even the names of the stars are friendly. Venus is any woman we love, the Bears are the bears of childhood

Every child was born with some kind of knowledge of love, he thought; they took it with the milk at the breast: but on parents and friends depended the kind of love they knew - the saving one or the damning kind. Lust too was a kind of love.

There is always that one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. ...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

His heart beat and the band played, and inside the lean experienced skull lay childhood.

Only in childhood do books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life, we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already.

His father had been slightly ahead, carrying sister Zoe. There were creatures looking at him from behind the blue slate rocks; they pointed their fingers and smiled cruel smiles. He felt safe in his mother's papoose (facing backwords) but was still afraid of the creatures. He was only just old enough to talk. He'd tried to make a sound but he was almost mesmerized by the creatures stirring in the wake of the family's passage.