Childhood Quotes - Page 24

• A real farmer. He spent his childhood in the wheat, and his marriage in the hay.

  Mae West

  Real, Hay, Wheat

  "Fictional character: Marlo Manners". "Sextette", www.imdb.com. 1978.

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• How few of us appreciate the fact that a very great deal of physical suffering in after life comes from bad mental training in childhood! I do not mean suffering of an imaginary kind; I mean disease which may entirely ruin a life which might have been of use to the world, and which surely would have been happier but for the lost health. Many a chronic invalid might have preserved his health had he been taught to use his brain properly when a child.

  Lyman Abbott

  Children, Mean, Appreciate

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• You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.

  Martin Amis

  Blood, Long, Track

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• Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.

  Novalis

  Children, Earth, Stage

  Novalis (1997). “Novalis: Philosophical Writings”, p.31, SUNY Press

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• The seen and seeing softly mutually strike Their glass barrier that arrests the sight. But the world's being hides in the volcanoes And the foul history pressed into its core; And to myself my being is my childhood And passion and entrails and the roots of senses; I'm pressed into the inside of a mask At the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.

  Stephen Spender

  Passion, Sight, Air

  Stephen Spender (2015). “New Collected Poems of Stephen Spender”, p.189, Faber & Faber

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• The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses.

  Edward Teller

  Eye, Lenses, Magnifying

  Edward Teller, Judith Schoolery (2009). “Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics”, p.5, Basic Books

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• I remember, I remember how my childhood fleeted by. The mirth of its December, and the warmth of its July.

  Winthrop Mackworth Praed

  July, Mirth, December

  Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1852). “Lillian: And Other Poems”, p.248

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• Old age is second childhood.

  Aristophanes

  Age, Old Age

  Nubes ( The Clouds), l.1417.

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• Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.

  Theodor Adorno

  Character, Self, Humanity

  Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno (2002). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.26, Stanford University Press

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• We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Children, Social, Sanctity

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.117, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Biographies, Prelude, Composer

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• The arts were a big part of my childhood. We went to the theatre and opera a lot as a family. We were not at all wealthy, but it was at a time when the arts were publicly funded and there were free tickets available. For someone like myself who wasn't that academically inclined, it was a great escape.

  Sarah Jessica Parker

  Art, Theatre, Opera

  "The Family Stone - Sarah Jessica Parker interview" by Jack Foley, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• It seems like a cliche, but you do grow up a lot faster when you travel a lot, go through things like this interview, spend time away from home and hang around with other actors. It's inevitable that you're not going to have a so-called normal childhood.

  Matt Dillon

  Growing Up, Home, Interviews

  "Matt Dillon Meets Fame... Diffidently". The Boston Globe, November 03, 1983.

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• In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential - we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today - well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?

  Edmund White

  Memories, Thinking, Roots

  "A Boy's Own Story". Book by Edmund White, E.P. Dutton, Chapter Four, p. 92, 1982.

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• All that stuff about my father and my childhood is interesting up to a certain point, but I kind of capsized with the family drama a long time ago. Now I want to get away from that. Not that I won't return to it, but a certain element has been exhausted, and it feels like why regurgitate all this stuff?

  Sam Shepard

  Drama, Father, Interesting

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• You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family -- children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses -- you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Children, School, Emotional

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• I want to talk about the internet, the impact it’s having on the innocence of our children, how online pornography is corroding childhood and how, in the darkest corners of the internet, there are things going on that are a direct danger to our children and that must be stamped out.

  David Cameron

  Children, Impact, Want

  "The internet and pornography: Prime Minister calls for action". www.gov.uk. July 22, 2013.

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• On this day I remember words that have stayed with me since my childhood and which matter a great deal to me today, my school motto: "I will try my outmost". This is my promise to all of the people of Britain and now let the work of change begin.

  Gordon Brown

  School, People, Promise

  Gordon Brown's First Speech as Prime Minister, www.telegraph.co.uk. June 27, 2007.

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• Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them.

  Michael Chabon

  Adventure, Eye, Land

  Michael Chabon (2012). “Maps and Legends”, p.21, HarperCollins UK

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• I like to keep people around me like the guys I have on the road with me, three of them were childhood friends of mine when I was growing up in Scotland. They don't look at me any different than when we were in primary school. So it's good to keep people like that around you. I think if you surround yourself with good honest people, they will tell you what to hear when you need to hear it.

  Johnny Reid

  Growing Up, School, Thinking

  "Johnny Reid headlining Fredericton's Maritime Countryfest". "Information Morning Fredericton" with Terry Seguin, www.cbc.ca. June 20, 2015.

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• I think maybe because I moved a lot in my childhood, I'm a little bit of a gypsy by nature.

  Carla Gugino

  Thinking, Littles, Gypsy

  "A little white lie made Carla Gugino Troop Beverly Hills' tallest scout". Interview with Erik Adams, www.avclub.com. June 17, 2015.

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• When you saw the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," that was Michael [Jackson]'s story write large. Born as an elderly person, Benjamin Button was, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and in the film starring Brad Pitt, he dies as a newborn child. Michael Jackson's childhood was one of enormous, prodigious production.He was a child prodigy, he was a wunderkind.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Children, Writing, Elderly

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• My whole childhood was filled with classical music and going to concerts of the New York Philharmonic and other New York ensembles and organizations, but interestingly, I didn't become conscious of wanting to be a musician until I was about 11. I was a rather late starter.

  Gunther Schuller

  New York, Organization, Musician

  "Listen Back To A 1988 Conversation With Composer Gunther Schuller". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. June 22, 2015.

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• Some people take the spelling bee very seriously. These people are called "parents of children in the spelling bee." They're trying to make up for their own childhood of crushed dreams and misspelled words.

  Craig Ferguson

  Dream, Children, People

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• No one with a happy childhood ever amounts to much in this world. They are so well adjusted, they never are driven to achieve anything.

  Sue Grafton

  World, Achieve, Driven

  "At Home With: Sue Grafton; a Is for Alter Ego". Interview with Enid Nemy, www.nytimes.com. August 04, 1994.

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