Childhood Quotes - Page 36

• Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Family, Children, Freedom

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1958). “Philosophy of right”

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• Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody. If you continually do this, you will soon act like a grown-up woman. For want of doing this, a very great number of grown-up people act like children.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Children, Thinking, Thoughtful

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• The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Made, Novel, Contribution

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• The Obedience of Children to their Parents is the Basis of all Government, and set forth as the measure of that Obedience which weowe to those whom Providence hath placed over us.

  Joseph Addison

  Children, Government, Parent

  Joseph Addison (1721). “The Spectator, no. 90-505”, p.159

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• Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone--childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

  Judith Viorst

  Growing Up, Home, World

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.157, Simon and Schuster

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• Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on--our lost narcissism lives on--in our ego ideal.

  Judith Viorst

  Dream, Giving Up, Growing Up

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.140, Simon and Schuster

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• The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.

  John Dewey

  Children, Community, Abiding

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Murray G. Murphey (2008). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924: 1922”, p.71, SIU Press

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• Cruel children, crying babies,
  All grow up as geese and gabies,
  Hated, as their age increases,
  By their nephews and their nieces.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Baby, Children, Growing Up

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2005). “A Child's Garden of Verses (Sparklesoup Classics)”, p.18, Sparklesoup LLC

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• Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Education, Children, Growing Up

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.

  James Joyce

  Country, Writing, Men

  "A brief survey of the short story part 32: James Joyce" by Chris Power, www.theguardian.com. March 9, 2011.

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• In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.

  Herman Melville

  Death, Men, Age

  Herman Melville (1855). “Mardi: And a Voyage Thither”, p.347

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• At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Garden, Games, Age

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• The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.

  Gail Sheehy

  Letting Go, Self, Safety

  Gail Sheehy (1977). “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life”, Bantam

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• 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.

  Robert Benchley

  Children, Hands, Pieces

  Robert Benchley (1970). “Benchley Lost and Found: 39 Prodigal Pieces”, p.69, Courier Corporation

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• On Michael Jackson and child stardom: He had one of the worst childhoods ever. I think I had the second.

  Elizabeth Taylor

  Children, Thinking, Fame

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• bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics.
  Or form a Piss Club where we all go
  in the bushes and peek at each other's sex.

  Anne Sexton

  Sex, Games, Catholic

  Anne Sexton (1978). “Words for Dr. Y.: uncollected poems with three stories”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky?
  Was there a father?
  Or have the planets cut holes in their nets
  and let our childhood out,
  or are we the dolls themselves,
  born but never fed?

  Anne Sexton

  Father, Fall, Cutting

  Anne Sexton (1976). “45 Mercy Street”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• Oh thumb,
  I want a drink
  it is dark,
  where are the big people,
  when will I get there...?

  Anne Sexton

  Dark, People, Thumbs

  Anne Sexton (1974). “The death notebooks”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• it
  was my first doll that water went
  into and water came out of much
  earlier it was the diaper I wore
  and the dirt thereof and my
  mother hating me for it

  Anne Sexton

  Mother, Hate, Water

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• At six
  I lived in a graveyard full of dolls,
  avoiding myself,
  my body, the suspect
  in its grotesque house.

  Anne Sexton

  House, Dolls, Body

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• And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Discovery, Piano

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• The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific andtorturous, involving and utterly tedious, all at the same time. The world is full of women made to feel strange because what everyone assumes comes naturally is so difficult to do--never mind to do well.

  Anna Quindlen

  Jobs, Motherhood, Mind

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• Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Responsibility, Maturity

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.53, Ballantine Books

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• I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Hate, Night, Vanity

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• We humans undergo two major growth spurts: one during infancy and another from eleven to twelve until fifteen or sixteen--pubescence. Between the two is a relatively quiescent growth period in which most of the body takes a rest from growing while the brain continues to mature. This period of life is general referred to as childhood or, sometimes, latency.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Two, Growth, Brain

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