Childhood Quotes

I loved my mother very much, but she was not a good cook. Most turkeys taste better the day after; my mother's tasted better the day before. In our house Thanksgiving was a time for sorrow.

The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Adults are only kids grown up

Miles: Well, things are kind of complicated right now. When you’re a grown-up, you’ll understand. Jonah: I don’t want to be a grown-up. Miles: Why not? Jonah: Because grown-ups always say that things are complicated.

I was kind of sweet kid, according my mother, and my recollections. Thoughtful and good, but kind of alone - although I didn't interpret it that way, as such. Children never interpret these things. They think they understand logically.

I never smoked a cigar in my life until I was nine

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.

I'll be darned!" said Douglas. "I never thought of that. That's brilliant! It's true. Old people never were children!" "And it's kind of sad," said Tom, sitting still."There's nothing we can do to help them.

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

There was at all events one advantage in the choice of this day to my birth; my birthday throughout the whole of my childhood was a day of public rejoicing.

In 'Changeling,' I tried to show something you'd never see nowadays - a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

I just like TV. I think to me, it replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away and they put a TV in instead and I got hooked on it.

I started taking ballet lessons when I was 4, and I was performing in ballet companies when I was 10, and I did summer stock in Miami Beach when I was 12, and finally I said, 'I gotta go to Broadway.'

My childhood was bad. No father. Mother was greedy and brought me up awful - never made me breakfast once. I don't want to get started. One story is worse than another.

My mom didn't let me eat sugar or candy until I was older.

I was so poor growing up...if I wasn't a boy...I'd have nothing to play with.

I played a little basketball. Some football in junior high.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

If you don't heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future.

The person who received maximum affection from mother, that person also sort of cultivated the potential showing affection to others.

If I walked into the kitchen without washing my hands as a kid, I'd hear a loud 'A-hem!' from my mother or grandmother. Now I count on other people to do the same.

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.

I have loved to cook since I was a child in my mother's kitchen. If I don't have time to cook, I'll just read a cookbook.

I've been singing Shakira songs in front of my bathroom mirror into my hairbrush forever. It's like a daily routine.

What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

As one boy said, 'I was thinking all these horrible thoughts about my parents when suddenly it hit me-if they're all that bad, how come I'm so wonderful'

By gum,' said Digory, 'Don't I just wish I was big enough to punch your head!

When I was a kid, if a guy got killed in a western movie I always wondered who got his horse.

When I was 3 years old, my parents got a dog. I was jealous of the dog, so they got rid of me.

I get a lot of parents coming up to me, telling me they are grooming their kids to be professional athletes. I'm really against that. I think it's a great life, and yeah, you can lead them in that direction. I think a lot of parents live their lives through the kids. Because they didn't make it, they want their kids to make it. It puts a lot of undue pressure on the kids.

I took a good deal o' pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for hisself. It's the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.

I threw my cup away when I saw a child drinking from his hands at the trough.

There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

My father was never very friendly. When I was growing up, I thought the doorbell ringing was a signal to pretend you weren't home.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.

I started skating and I kind of liked it because I could run circles around the guys that wouldn't pick me to play baseball.

Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be 12 years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. Well, I won't do that.

Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Avoid compulsion and let early education be a matter of amusement. Young children learn by games; compulsory education cannot remain in the soul.

We should treat children as God does us, who makes us happiest when He leaves us under the influence of innocent delusions.

It took me years to eat a lot of shellfish. I was probably 20 years old before I had even seen a shrimp cocktail. I like oysters, but fried.

I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.

Why are they sad and glad and bad? I do not know, go ask your dad.

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

When I was a kid I got no respect. When I went on the roller coaster, my old man told me to stand up straight.

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least

I grew up very poor in rural Alabama.

My mom had Julia Child and 'The Fannie Farmer Cookbook' on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown people who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.

In my fifth-grade yearbook - it's right up there on the top shell - the last page says, "What about your future?" and under my name, it says, "When I grow up, I would like to be either an actor, a radio announcer, an impersonator or a comedian."

A teacher sent the following note home with a six-year-old boy 'He is too stupid to learn.' That boy was Thomas A. Edison.