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Childhood Quotes

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Childhood Quotes

“Adolescence is a relatively recent thing in human history -- a period of years between the constraints of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood. This irresponsible period of adolescence is artificially extended by long years of education, much of it wasted on frivolities. Tenure extends adolescence even further for teachers and professors.”

“A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking out of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.”

“Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others' reasons for action, or the basis of others' emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers.”

“In my early childhood, I was a performer by nature. I used to do puppet shows as a kid and entertain kids in classes and the teachers would make it a point that I was the entertainer of the class, but only after high school and in college that I started doing theater and acting classes, because I thought it would be fun.”

“My mother did an incredible job - one, of just being a great mom, but two, of instilling a tremendous amount of empathy into me as a young man, as a young person. My mom was kind of this collector of people; throughout my childhood, it didn't matter who you were. She was a high school counselor and then a junior high counselor, and she didn't just counsel students, she counseled other teachers and administrators and coaches.”

“My school music teacher, Al Bennest, introduced me to jazz by playing Louis Armstrong's record of "West End Blues" for me. I found more jazz on the radio, and began looking for records. My paper route money, and later, money I earned working after school in a print shop and a butcher shop went toward buying jazz records. I taught myself the alto saxophone and the drums in order to play in my high school dance band.”

“I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.”

“What was on the agenda was school and social life and those kinds of things. So I was the middle of five kids. So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that's part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.”

“What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.”

“After it's all over, the early childhood, a chain of birthdays woven with candlelight, piles of presents, voices of relatives singing and praising your promise and future, after the years of schooling, fitting yourself into different size desks, memorizing, reciting, reporting, and performing for jury after jury of teachers, counselors, and administrators, you still feel inadequate, alone, vulnerable, and naked in a world that can be unforgiving and terribly demanding.”