Childhood Quotes

My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts.

Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

I began absolutely non-stop tormenting my parents, begging them on a daily basis to move there.

Every puppy should have a boy.

I was happy to be with my parents. I didn't see very much of them, so I was very happy when my father was there and out of jail.

I didn't know much about golf growing up.

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

Before we sent kids to computer camps and told them they were having a good time, there was imagination among the human species.

As a kid I had a dream - I wanted to own my own bicycle. When I got the bike I must have been the happiest boy in Liverpool, maybe the world. I lived for that bike. Most kids left their bike in the backyard at night. Not me. I insisted on taking mine indoors and the first night I even kept it in my bed.

When I was born ... the doctor came out to the waiting room and said to my father ... I'm very sorry. We did everything we could ... but he pulled through.

I make jokes about it, but it's the truth that I kind of patterned my look after the town tramp. I didn't know what she was, just this woman who was blond and piled her hair up, wore high heels and tight skirts, and, boy, she was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen. Momma used to say, "Aw, she's just trash," and I thought, That's what I want to be when I grow up. Trash.

There is a core of loneliness. It's partly existential. Secondly, I was raised a loner. My parents were not there. My father was asked to leave because he couldn't metabolize ethanol. Actually, my mother ran away with us when I was 2 months old and my brother was 5. Real dramatic stuff: down the fire escape, through backyards. So, I sort of raised myself. I was alone a lot and I invented myself - I lived through the radio and through my imagination.

The older you get, the more you learn to see what you've been taught to see. When you're a kid, you see what's there.

A child motivated by competitive ideals will grow into a man without conscience, shame, or true dignity.

I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.

It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late, so that they even consulted a doctor. I can't say how old I was - but surely not less than three.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it's just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

I don't even know how to speak up for myself, because I don't really have a father who would give me the confidence or advice. And if you're always the new kid, you never get a chance to adapt, so your confidence is just zilch.

My pops and my mom started playing Marvin Gaye and the Isley Brothers and all these people, but at the same time, they always had Snoop on right behind it in the same mix.

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.

I got to ninth grade and there was wrestling, and I went, 'Wait a minute, this is fun.' Basically, it was a chance for a small kid like me to get a chance to wail on another small kid. I went, 'I love this.' The discipline of it was great. Plus, I really started to be good at it.

When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.

First grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.

...But we enjoyed playing games and were punished for them by men who played games themselves. However, grown-up games are known as 'business' and even though boys' games are much the same, they are punished for them by their elders. No one pities either the boys or the men, though surely we deserve pity, for I cannot believe that a good judge would approve of the beatings I received as a boy on the ground that my games delayed my progress in studying subjects which would enable me to play a less creditable game later in life.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.

As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula.

When I was a kid, I had two friends, and they were imaginary and they would only play with each other.

I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child's mind--seven and a half years old--I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years.

My mother and I had a lot of distance between us emotionally, although, on the surface, most of the time, we appeared good and friendly, and all that. But I was a problem. I was a street kid.

"The twins no longer derive their sustenance from Nature's founts - in short," said Mr. Micawber, in one of his bursts of confidence, "they are weaned..."

What a childhood I had. My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist. The kid didn't help me at all.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

Well, I just want him to grow up happy. That's the main thing.

Dear Basketball, From the moment I started rolling my dad's tube socks and shooting imaginary game-winning shots ... I fell in love with you.

I daydreamed that when you grow up there are more bullies and how wonderful that would be if it were true, but, it's not.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.

On Halloween, because we don't celebrate it, my dad would drive me somewhere, anywhere different. Like Little Italy in New York to walk around and teach me all about the food and culture.

In middle school, my friends decided I was weird, and they didn’t like my hair. They ditched me and talked behind my back, which is cool — I’m over it. [laughs] One time I called them and said, “Hey, do you want to go to the Berkshire Mall?” They all gave me excuses and said no. So I go to the mall with my mom, and don’t you know, we run into all of them. Together. Shopping. My mom could see I was about to cry, so she said, “You know what? We’re going to the King of Prussia mall,” which was the mecca.

Those who tread 'adult' as a term of approval cannot hope to be considered adult themselves. When I became a man I put away childish things, along with the desire to be very grown up.

Admiration spoils all from infancy.

Give your child a spanking once a day. If you don't know why, he does.

Seventy-five years ago I was born in Tampico, Illinois, in a little flat above the bank building. We didn't have any other contact with the bank than that.

I was mentally, emotionally and verbally abused by my father as far back as I can remember until I left home at the age of eighteen

When I was about twelve I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody's noticed. If there is such a thing as a genius, I am one, and if there isn't I don't care.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

You could analyze me and say that my father leaving and being absent was a motivator for early ambition, trying to prove myself to this apparition who had vanished. You could argue that me being a mixed kid in a place where there weren't a lot of black kids around might have spurred on my ambitions. You could go through a whole litany of things that sparked me wanting to do something important.

My father... removed from Kentucky to... Indiana, in my eighth year... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up... Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher... but that was all.

And they heard the roaring thunder of a third brilliantly lighted express. "Are they pursuing the first travelers?" demanded the little prince. "They are pursuing nothing at all," said the switchman. "They are asleep in there, or if they are not asleep they are yawning. Only the children are flattening their noses against the windowpanes." "Only the children know what they are looking for," said the little prince. "They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry..." "They are lucky," the switchman said.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.

My mother made soft polenta often, and as a child, I would watch her stir until she looked like her arm would fall off.

When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, auditioning for Broadway was my dream.

I always wanted to fire rays out of my fingertips.

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.

Dispel not, the happy delusions of children.

I had to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life - it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment.

When I was a child, there's one thing I said: 'I never want to be alone.' That's what I would say. I don't want to be alone.