Quotes About Childhood

Why should she try to do these things? What motivates a child to grow?

Why even ask the question? Growth is "natural," a child "develops," its potentialities "unfold." The words themselves, in their root meanings, proclaim inevitability.

I wanted an electric train for Christmas but I got the saxophone instead.

Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful.

Speaking for myself, I am only true when I'm alone. As a child, I always feared that I was about to fall off the face of the earth at any minute. Why do the clouds keep afloat when everything else drops to the ground? The explanation is simple: the gravity is less than the force of air that sustains the clouds. Clever, don't you think? Yes, but sooner or later they fall in the form of rain. That is my revenge.

desde la niñez no fue más que un corazón solitario que latía con dificultad en el espacio.

I can feel myself holding a child, thought Joanna. Sleep, my child, sleep, I tell you. The child is warm and I am sad.

Obviously, our children, who have been playing with their computers since the age of five or six, don't have quite the same brain as those who were brought up on wooden or metal toys, whose brains are certainly atrophied by comparison.

The days of our childhood were steep steps into a collapsing mind. It looked like we rescued ourselves, were rescued. Then there are these days, each day of our adult lives. They will never forget our way through, these brothers, each brother, my brother, dear brother, my dearest brother, dear heart --

When I was a kid, the punishment I disliked the most was writing sentences. My mother loved to make me record my transgressions--always a minimum of five hundred times--and she even bought special spiral notebooks for me to fill up.... No matter how many notebooks I went through, there was always another one waiting in the kitchen drawer.

There were three terrible ages of childhood -- zero to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.

Computers deliver an abundance of symbols yet offer an impoverishment of experience. Do our children need to see more icons, corporate logos, and glitzy fonts... or do they need more time climbing, running, and figuring out how to get along with each other?

Two childhood best friends made a promise, that they will check each other out every year. It happened. When they saw each other again, they did the same thing... in heaven.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

The sound of the sea you hear in Proust, as if the whole book were a shell held to your ear, is the sound of the amniotic fluid, reminding you, across all your barriers of self-protection, that the first thing you ever heard was voices in the water.

It's always the ones who wring their hands demanding that someone defend, protect or educate the children, who are the most ruthless murderers of childhood.

And I was very shy as a kid if you sang me 'Happy Birthday ' I would cry. Quite shy. So the idea of being an actor, much less a model, was just out of this world.

Siri's dream world had always been bizarre. In his childhood, the images that lurked there constantly interrupted his sleep. The same woman who raised him would come to his bed and remind him that these were his dreams inside his head, and nobody had more right to be in there than he. He learned how to walk tall through his nightmares and not be afraid of what happened there.

Aion is a child at play, playing draughts; the kingship is a child's.

I did grow up next door to Steve McQueen, who was a very famous movie star at the time, but as a kid it didn't impress me. We always had great fun with him. He would take us out on Sundays on his motorcycles, riding around in the desert he was like a second father.

Never neglect an opportunity to play leap-frog; it is the best of all games, and, unlike the terribly serious and conscientious pastimes of modern youth, will never become professionalized.

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

If you want to find a child's weakness, failures, personal problems, or inadequacies, you'll discover them. If you look at a child through the filter of her or his environment or economic status, and make judgments through the filters of your own cultural, gender, and racial biases, you'll find the characteristics you expect.

Do but consider for a moment that the regimen to which children are subject, is hourly telling upon them to their lifelong injury or benefit; and that there are twenty ways of going wrong to one way of going right; and you will get some idea of the enormous mischief that is almost everywhere inflicted by the thoughtless, haphazard system in common use.