Childhood Quotes - Page 38

• A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.

  Anthony Browne

  Lonely, Character, Underdog

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• For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?

  Ian Mcewan

  Children, Growing Up, Memories

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• I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

  Heather O'Neill

  Unfortunate Things, Fiction, Able

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• I like the way corduroys feel. I like the sort of jean aspect of corduroys, but also the texture of them. They probably remind me of my childhood, too, I think. I wore cords, and my dad had a corduroy jacket.

  Noah Baumbach

  Dad, Thinking, Texture

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• We can never put ourselves in the shoes of children; we cannot fathom their thoughts, we lend them ours; and always following ourown reasoning, we stuff their heads with extravagance and error.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Education, Children, Errors

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• For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

  David Nicholls

  Children, Book, Parent

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• "A child!" said Edith, looking at her. "When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman - artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men - before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride tonight."

  Charles Dickens

  Children, Character, Pride

  Charles Dickens (1867). “Charles Dickens's works. Charles Dickens ed. [18 vols. of a 21 vol. set. Wanting A child's history of England; Christmas stories; The mystery of Edwin Drood].”, p.245

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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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• ... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

  Edna O'Brien

  Country, Stars, Flower

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• Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded.

  Alice Miller

  Mother, Children, Pain

  Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.254, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Children, Zambia, Mind

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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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• 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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• The American civil space program is growing to maturity. It has passed through the joys and crises of precocious childhood and now is being called upon to do grown-up things, like earn a living and establish permanent roots in space.

  John Noble Wilford

  Maturity, Roots, Space

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• I wanted to be a surgeon, possibly influenced by the qualities of our family doctor who cared for our childhood ailments.

  Joseph Murray

  Doctors, Quality, Our Family

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• Childhood and youth are ends in themselves, not stages.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Youth, Ends, Stage

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• Young children learn in a different manner from that of older children and adults, yet we can teach them many things if we adapt our materials and mode of instruction to their level of ability. But we miseducate young children when we assume that their learning abilities are comparable to those of older children and that they can be taught with materials and with the same instructional procedures appropriate to school-age children.

  David Elkind

  Children, School, Age

  David Elkind (1987). “Miseducation: preschoolers at risk”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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