Childhood Quotes

What is the best early training for a writer? An unhappy childhood.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age the child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

You will find as the children grow up that as a rule children are a bitter disappointment - their greatest object being to do precisely what their parents do not wish and have anxiously tried to prevent.

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.

As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.

"It's come at last", she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache."

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

"Did you have a happy childhood?" is a false question. As a child I did not know what happiness was, and whether I was happy or not. I was too busy being.

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

Wow, look at the grass stains on my skin. I say, if you knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.

What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life.

I was the kid next door's imaginary friend.

I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included.

Children nowadays are tyrants. They
contradict their parents, gobble
their food and tyrannise their teachers.

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

A boy's will is the wind's will
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

My dear young fellow,' the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, 'there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet.

When late morning rolls around and you're feeling a bit out of sorts, don't worry; you're probably just a little eleven o'clockish.