Quotes about Childhood

It's never to late to have a happy childhood

Black love is Black wealth and they'll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.

"Think about your childhood for a moment. What was your favorite outdoor place to play? What was that environment like? Do your memories evoke specific sights, scents, and sounds? What did you do there? What did it look like and feel like? Did this place change along with the seasons? What sort of games did you play and what did you discover there?

"Most of us have vivid memories of our favorite childhood play environment. This was the place where we began to discover the wonder of playful exploration. It was the place where we first interacted with the natural world. This place was our introduction to the environment, our community, and the cycles of life.

"The places that adults remember playing in as children are so often natural places - places with a stream, clumps of spongy moss, thick layers of slippery mud, fallen logs, or even a mound of dirt piled high in a vacant lot in the city. There is just something about connecting with the natural world that is so important for all people - particularly children. These are the kinds of experiences that nourish our souls.

"Unfortunately, these days many children don't have the kinds of opportunities that we had not so long ago. Our fast-paced culture now places greater emphasis on going, doing, and becoming, and less on wandering, searching, and discovering. With modern urban and suburban development, natural or wild areas are less available."

Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new-created in all the freshness of childhood.

I was never happy as a child, so it wasn't something I took for granted.
i did'nt grow up as an average, american child.
An average child grows up with an expectation of being happy.

The sad bitter child who grew up too fast,
is hardly ever out of my heart.
With succes all around me, I can still feel
her scared eyes looking out of mine.

"Like so many of us, I spent a great deal of my life....cataloging all the ways I had been injured and abused...I analyzed and categorized the whos, whats and wheres of my misery.  I was a confirmed pessimist, always able to see the dark side of anything and everything.  My belief was that life was hard and disaster was looming around every corner...Despite life's difficulties, it was my responsibility to do all the good I could and become the best person I could be...I started to notice the dearth of positive emotions in my life...I knew precious little about joy, happiness, optimism, faith and trust....That's when I learned that you don't have to be saddled for life with mental attitudes you adopted in childhood.  All of us are free to change our minds, and as we change our minds, our experiences will also change."

Backward turn backward o time in your flight Make me a child again just for tonight...

For a boy, I had been doing extraordinary things, which caused much wonder. Before I could walk, I could play on the piano, with one finger, any tunes that I heard, then, gradually, with all fingers, even the complex melodies played by blind Mr. Maynard, who, to me, was the greatest man in all the world.
Mr. Maynard lived in the dark but walked and talked with God in the Light. And what the soul of Creation told his Soul, he told me – and I walked and talked with God in those early days in His wonderlands of Peat Meadow and the huge oaks down in Bachelder’s wilds where nobody went but me, for no one else in all My World heard what I heard there – nor saw what I saw there – so it was mine alone, all that glory just mine alone.

"Already from earliest childhood it was my deepest wish to understand nature and through this to come closer to the truth I could not find at school or at church. I was repeatedly drawn to the forest where I could watch the flow of water for hours on end without getting tired or irritable. At that time I did not yet know that water is the bearer of life or the source of what we call consciousness. Totally oblivious, I let water flow past my searching eyes and only years later did I become aware that this running water attracts our consciousness magnetically, takes a piece with it, with a force that is so strong that one loses consciousness for a while and involuntarily falls into a deep sleep. And so, gradually I began to play with these forces in water and I gave up this so-called free consciousness and left it to the water for a while. Little by little this game turned into a very serious matter because I saw that it was possible to release my own consciousness from my body and attach it to the water. When I took it back again, the consciousness borrowed from the water told me things that were often very strange. And so the searcher became a researcher who could send his consciousness on expeditions, so to speak, and this way I found out about things the rest of mankind has missed because they do not know that people are able to send their free consciousness everywhere, even where the seeing eye cannot look. This so-called sight practiced with blindfolded eyes finally gave me ties to the secrets of nature which I slowly began to recognize and understand in their own fabric. And in due course it became clear to me that we human beings are used to seeing everything backwards and wrong. The biggest surprise, however, was that we human beings let the most valuable part drain off as useless and from all the great intellectuality that flows through us, we retain only the feces."

Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: 'What does his voice sound like?' 'What games does he like best?' 'Does he collect butterflies?' They ask: 'How old is he?' 'How many brothers does he have?' 'How much does he weigh?' 'How much money does his father make?' Only then do they think they know him.

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.

In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

If something in her childhood had led her to dash off so many shades of bad weather, then what would we do when we grew up?

People still retain the errors of their childhood, their nation, and their age, long after they have accepted the truths needed to refute them. 

The Eeyore Educational System sees childhood as a waste of time, a luxury that society cannot afford . . . Put children in school at the earliest age possible; load them down with homework; take away their time, their creativity, their play, their power; then plug them into machines.

You only have to read the lines of scribbly black and everything shines.

My addiction to reading (and my career as a librarian) grew out of a childhood that was rescued from despair by books, libraries, and librarians.

He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it. It made him feel better, though he felt perturbed, too, worried that this kiss was wrong. But from his point of view, at fourteen years old, their love was entirely unavoidable. It had started on the day they’d clung to his glass box and kissed in the sea, and now it must go on forever. He felt certain of this.

In short, the habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference.