Quotes About Childhood

Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.

odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me. The result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought.

He saw a child dipping a can into a bright-green stream and asked if they drank that water. Yes, and washed in it too, for the landlord only allowed water to be turned on twice a week. Such sights were the more surprising, because one might come upon them in the most sedate and civilised quarters of London—"the most aristocratic parishes have their share." Behind Miss Barrett's bedroom, for instance, was one of the worst slums in London.

Il suo gusto per i libri era stato precoce. Da bambino, a volte un paggio lo trovava, a mezzanotte, ancora intento a leggere. [...] Per dirla in breve, Orlando era un nobile malato d'amore per la letteratura.

As a child he had walked in Regent's Park—odd, he thought, hope the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places: and their fathers—a woman's always proud of her father.

children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of--to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, 'This is what I have made of it! This!' And what had she made of it? What, indeed?

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.

The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved, was gone, but I kept looking for her - long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn't heal.

The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

I appeal to parents: never, never say, Hurry up, to a child. (62)

From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.

The crickets kept crepitating; from time to time there came a sweet whiff of burning juniper; and above the black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray with stars, made one's head spin, and suddenly Martin again experienced a feeling he had known on more than one occasion as a child: an unbearable intensification of all his senses, a magical and demanding impulse, the presence of something for which alone it was worth living.

Dimly, I recall running up to his chair to show him a pretty pebble, which he slowly examined and then slowly put into his mouth.

For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, pinging pebbles at an empty can.

I am not concerned with the moron, the ordinary hairless ape, who takes everything in his stride; his only childhood memory is of a mule that bit him; his only consciousness of the future a vision of board and bed. What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage.

I will never go back. For the simple reason that all the Russia I need, after all, is with me--always with me. Her literature, her language, my own Russian childhood. I will never return, I will never surrender.

all forms of vitality are forms of velocity, and no wonder a growing child desires to out-Nature Nature by filling a minimum stretch of time with a maximum of spatial enjoyment. Innermost in man is the spiritual pleasure derivable from the possibilities of outtugging and outrunning gravity, of overcoming or re-enacting the earth's pull.

I tore apart the fantasies of Poe, And dealt with childhood memories of strange Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range.

And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child's finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.

Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that, in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.' Lolita, Part II, Chapter 31

Oh, said Haze, poor me should know, I went through that when I was a kid: boys twisting one's hair, hurting one's breasts, flipping one's skirt.

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