Quotes About Childhood

I grew up poor, but I didn't really know it because of amazing places like the Salvation Army where we got a lot of our Christmas presents from.

There is a dark side. I tend not to be as optimistic as Mary Richards. I have an anger in me that I carry from my childhood experiences - I expect a lot of myself and I'm not too kind to myself.

Our own system of trying to guess what or how much a child's mind can assimilate results in cross purposes, misunderstanding, disappointments, anger and a general loss of harmony.

Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One's

Counting noses, Bess missed Andy and went to look for him. She found him finally in the dining room, in the corner at the end of the sideboard, crying. The knowledge of it passed over us all. He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

Whereas the Odyssey represents the maturity of the moral consciousness of a whole people, Huckleberry Finn shows only its beginnings in the mind of a child. And with a self-protective dexterity that would not have surprised Mark Twain in the least, the adult racist mentality of America has dealt with the threat of that beginning by decreeing that Huckleberry Finn is not a book for the chastening of adults, which to a large extent it certainly is, but a book for the entertainment of children.

Before he started to school he knew this farm as he knew the inside of his clothes.

But all those who were there, if they had lived past childhood, had twice in this world, first and last, been as helpless as a little child.

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.

I suppose I was artistic as a child. Our house was so full of art and artists that it never occurred to me not to be constantly making things. I just assumed that all kids liked to work with their hands as much as I did. I was an only child so I did have a lot of time to be creative by myself and with my parents.

but Lake Pepin might be best known to most of the world as the place where, more than a hundred and thirty years ago, a little kid picked up too many pebbles.

subtitled it 'Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find your Childhood Imaginary Friend but Were Afraid to Ask.

For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura's dress.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar …" —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

He was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window.

heard mother speak of him. Father? Ah, dear!

The elements of instruction . . . should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a freeman should be a freeman too in the acquisition of knowledge . . . . Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child (536).

Neither youth nor childhood is folly or incapacity

Little boy, Full of joy; Little girl, Sweet and small; Cock does crow, So do you; Merry voice, Infant noise; Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.

Did you ever have a sister? did you?

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they don't really know what they mean.

There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything, given time, but to what it can accept, a limit in time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible.

He says it harshly, savagely, but he does not say the word. Like a little boy in the dark to flail his courage and suddenly aghast into silence by his own noise.

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size.