Quotes About Childhood

When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.

My parents used to take me to the pet department and tell me it was a zoo.

Always, ever since I was a little girl, my house has been basically a zoo.

When I was six years old, my parents took me to this farmers' market with a petting zoo. They put me on a pony and, for some reason, it took off at a run and they had to chase it down. They tell me it was kind of traumatic.

Living in a zoo means it wasn't always sparkly dresses, but I would still dress up. I had this pink sparkly dress and fairy wings, and I'd put those on and then go and dance in the zoo.

I have spent my entire life living in a zoo, which is pretty crazy. Not many kids get to say that, and it took me until I was about three years old to realize that we didn't just come to the zoo every day, that we actually lived here.

Nick spent his first years on walks in his stroller and Snugli, playing in Berkeley parks and baby gyms and visiting zoos and aquariums. His mother and I divorced when he was 4. No child benefits from the bitterness and savagery of a divorce like ours.

I grew up near London Zoo, with which I was obsessed. I would lie in bed at night, thinking about the lions and tigers and wolves that were prowling only a few miles away.

Sweetest li'l feller, everybody knows; Dunno what to call him, but he's mighty lak' a rose; Lookin' at his mammy wid eyes so shiny blue Mek' you think that Heav'n is comin' clost ter you.

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book.

Let a man turn to his own childhood-no further-if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

There was a little girl, And she had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead; When she was good she was very, very good, When she was bad she was horrid.

How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection presents them to view.

I think that saving a little child And bringing him to his own, Is a derned sight better business Than loafing around the throne.

Children have no use for psychology. They detest sociology. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff. When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish allusions.

The events of childhood do not pass but repeat themselves like seasons of the year.

What's done to children, they will do to society.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.

Mother love has been much maligned. An over mothered boy may go through life expecting each new woman to love him the way his mother did. Her love may make any other love seem inadequate. But an unloved boy would be even more likely to idealize love. I don't think it's possible for a mother or father to love a child too much.

Oh, I love to see a man with a cigar. It reminds me of my grandfather. Morning to night, he used to sit with a great big stogie dangling from his lips. Oh, the hours we kids used to spend sitting on his lap, playing with the yellow whiskers beneath his nose. Then he'd take out his teeth with the cigar still in them and chase us around the room! We'd all laugh and laugh . . . then suddenly Grampa's mood would change, and we'd all have to run for our lives. . . . You can't buy memories like that.

There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.

Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.