Childhood Quotes

Back then, a few doilies and napkins were all that a lot of women had. In the little house where I grew up, the pillowcases my grandmother embroidered were the only things of beauty.

There are videos where I would go approaching strangers and sing the songs from 'The Lion King. I would have been about four years, and I came running up to people on the beach, strangers that I chose at random and began to sing, and my family never knew where I was, they were always looking for me, trying to imagine who I was harassing this time .

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.

My father used to call me the laughing hyena.

I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

Kids are curious.Kids are watching ants while adults are stepping on them.

I used to say to my auntie, 'You throw my fu*kin' poetry out, and you'll regret it when I'm famous,' and she threw the bast*rd stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fu*kin' genius or whatever I was when I was a child.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were . . . . It happened bit by bit, until . . . you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand -- the people you hated when you were ten.

I have recall. I don't know why or how. I had a guy once who said he played against me in novice [league, for kids under nine], for the Detroit Lasers. And I said, "Oh yeah, we beat you in the tournament, 8-1 and I think I scored seven goals, and the goalie was left-handed." And he was, "Oh my God. I was the goalie!" .

I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the cherry tree.

Raising kids is like nailing Jell-O to a tree.

As with all children, the feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.

The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child.

The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.

I wasn’t thriving socially, so I stayed in my room and played guitar all the time, at the time, I thought I was inventing a new sound that would change the whole outlook of music. I’ve discovered in the last few years that it was just the Seattle Sub Pop sound.

When I was a kid I got no respect. The time I was kidnapped, and the kidnappers sent my parents a note they said, "We want five thousand dollars or you'll see your kid again."

Tis aye a solemn thing to meTo look upon a babe that sleeps--Wearing in its spirit-deepsThe unrevealed mysteryOf its Adam's taint and woe,Which, when they revealed lie,Will not let it slumber so.

[On growing up in a large family with little money:] ... to take a bath ... we just had a pan of water and we'd wash down as far as possible, and we'd wash up as far as possible. Then, when somebody'd clear the room, we'd wash possible.

Weird behavior is natural in smart children, just as curiosity is to a kitten.

After my training wheels, my first real bike was a Schwinn, and my first time out, I rode down a hill, didn’t know how to stop, and ran right into a tree. So, that was a nice experience ... like realizing, oh, there are brakes!

The smallest coffins are the heaviest.

Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth.

I've been my mom's kitchen helper since I was a little kid.

Oh I don’t wanna grow up, wish I’d never grown upIt could still be simple.

I can remember staring at the orphanage and feeling envy.

As a child, when asked what I would be, I usually said I was going to be a huntsman. A fine profession, truly!

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!

I was the girl who didn’t get invited to parties.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but there was no one to ask. Besides I knew that people only told lies to children-lies about everything from soup to Santa Claus.

School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.

When I was a kid I got no respect. I told my mother, I'm gonna run away from home. She said, On your mark.

The train skimmed on softly, slithering, black pennants fluttering, black confetti lost on its own sick-sweet candy wind, down the hill, with the two boys pursuing, the air was so cold they ate ice cream with each breath.

Only the children know what they are looking for. 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.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, 'Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.'

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.

It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.

The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.

If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.

There is nothing I can't live without. I learned this attitude when I was a child.

The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.

One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more.

I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I've never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children.

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!" Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.

This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

If you act like an adult when you're a kid you can afford to act like a kid the rest of your life.

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child... eventually.

... what is there over which the incomparable beauty of childhood would not triumph?