Quotessence
Home / Topics / Childhood Quotes

Childhood Quotes

Browse 4994 quotes about Childhood.

Related topics

Childhood Quotes

“None of us ever escape the first few years of our lives. They make a mould into which we are cast, and though it may be broken, and we turned loose, some remnant of it, some intangible evil or lovely thing or both, will remain with us, like the odor to a flower, or the smoothness to a piece of ivory. It is part of the immortality of youth.”

“A child of three cannot raise its chubby fist to its mouth to remove a piece of carpet which it is through eating, without being made the subject of a psychological seminar of child-welfare experts, and written up, along with five hundred other children of three who have put their hands to their mouths for the same reason.”

“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past--the portrayals of family life on such television programs as "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" and all the rest.”

“I couldn't listen to music with lyrics for the first few months after the brain surgery, because they were too complex and disturbing. So I listened to a lot of classical music. I didn't really want to read, either, so I listened to books on tape or watched movies. I also re-taught myself all of my childhood piano pieces. It helped me repair my brain.”

“I think a lot of us who had these oddly shaped childhoods, in some ways we're hyper-capable. We're able to take care of ourselves in a lot of ways but it's like we're missing a piece. When everyone went to school to learn how to be a regular person we were sick that day. We compensate other ways. Alcohol and drugs is one of those ways. Instead of learning how to cope with our problems and deal with hardship and deal with anger, we just decide to get drunk and not care.”

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”

“You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.”

“Im haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words. Ive been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.”

“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”