Childhood Quotes

I knew so little about money I used to sign my check, "Love, Rita."

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

I think every human being, born from mother, and at least the next few years, you see, received immense affection from our mother. So the child's first experience in this lifetime at the beginning, I think that immense affection from other is in our blood. So therefore, the whole rest of life, other people show you smile, genuine sort of closeness feeling. You feel happy. Even animals also like that.

I mean, I grew up in a community where people took care of each other. I grew up in a community where my mother, my parents, my extended family really wanted for children to be nurtured and challenged and not harmed.

When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.

When I was a kid, I never went to Disneyland. My ol' man told me Mickey Mouse died in a cancer experiment.

I knew I was blessed with a gift of having both parents.

I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.

I started smoking as soon as I went on the stage. I'd make cigars out of the Morning World when I was a kid.

My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.

For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.

We are all born children- the trick is remaining one.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

For the first seven years of my life, I listened to nothing but The Beatles.

I grew up in New York wanting to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio.

All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.

I always wanted to know, and I always used to daydream, about what it would be like to stand on a really big stage and sing songs for a lot of people, songs that I had written... Daydreaming was kind of my No. 1 thing when I was little, because I didn't have much of a social life going on.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.

Adults are always telling young people, 'These are the best years of your life.' Are they? I don't know. Sometimes when adults say this to children I look into their faces. They look like someone on the top seat of the Ferris wheel who has had too much cotton candy and barbecue. They'd like to get off and be sick but everyone keeps telling them what a good time they're having.

(about her teen years) My admirers all said the same thing in different ways. It was my fault, their wanting to kiss and hug me.

I was an only child. I did have kind of like a lonely existence.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink - boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

When you start in the childhood period, when you begin to form a comic sense, it was the radio comedians - from the last days of radio and the first days of television. And Spike Jones. And the Marx Brothers. They represented anarchy. They took things that were nice and decent and proper, and they tore them to shreds. That attracted me.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

The merry-go-round was running, yes, but... It was running backward. The small calliope inside the carousel machinery rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choked and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes.

A sleeping child gives me the impression of a traveler in a very far country.

My father and mother separated when I was two months old.

And the first step, as you know, is always what matters most, particularly when we are dealing with those who are young and tender. That is the time when they are taking shape and when any impression we choose to make leaves a permanent mark.

Tupac, Biggie, Jay. Your usual suspects. These were the people that was played in my household.

Dad told me to stop running in circles, I couldn't, so he nailed down my other foot!

I had a paper route when I was a kid. I was supposed to go to 2,000 houses. Or two dumpsters.

I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.

I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... 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.

Everyone’s childhood plays itself out. No wonder no one knows the other or can completely understand. By this I don’t know if I’m just giving up with this conclusion or resigning myself — or maybe for the first time connecting with reality. How do we know the pain or another’s earlier years, let alone all that he drags with him since along the way at best a lot of leeway is needed for the other — yet how much is unhealthy for one to bear. I think to love bravely is the best and accept — as much as one can bear.

I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper. And, of course, after that it's just a small step to full-blown sociopath.

But they (the infantry) had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

If you ever want to see heaven, watch a bunch of young girls play. They are all sweat and skinned knees. Energy and open faces.

What a childhood I had, why, when I took my first step, my old man tripped me!

My mother had morning sickness after I was born.

MOTHER: Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping. Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, bring lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day. JIM: I'm never going to own anything that can hurt me.

The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness; for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.

Make a lot of walks to get healthy and don't read that much but save yourself some until you're grown up.

In the true man there is a child concealed who wants to play.

It has that thing - the imagination, and the feeling of happy excitement- I knew when I was a kid.

[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

The kids are old enough now - I just want to let them be kids. I don't want to comment on them too much. They're at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

My father had a piano that was a nickelodeon - put a nickel, and the roller would play.

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.

Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.

And that is a story that no one can beat, When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street.

When I was kidnapped as a child my parents sent a letter to the hijackers me Pay 5,000 dollars or your back

The high IQ has become the American equivalent of the Legion of Honor, positive proof of a child's intellectual aristocracy.... It has become more important to be a smart kid than a good kid or even a healthy kid.

As a child I did a lot of imaginary bits, you know. It depends on the individual, I enjoyed then knocking the nail in, I enjoy knocking nails in walls to hang pictures up, but I also enjoy thinking 'I'm gonna do that' but I actually won't do it, I enjoy imagining doing things just as much.

The things which the child loves remain in the domain of the heart until old age. The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remain hovering over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves. I am one of those who remembers those places regardless of distance or time.