Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
—George Will (b.1941) American Columnist, Author, Commentator
I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.
—Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1832–98) British Author, Mathematician, Clergyman, Logician
Let a man turn to his own childhood—no further—if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
—Alice Meynell (1847–1922) British Poet, Essayist, Suffragist
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
—Robertson Davies (1913–95) Canadian Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) English Novelist
Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth – two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
—Graham Greene (1904–1991) British Novelist, Short Story Writer, Playwright
The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.
—Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American Actor, Dancer, Singer
Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.
—Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) British Novelist
Childhood is a short season.
—Helen Hayes (1900–93) American Actress, Philanthropist
What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love.
—Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327) German Christian Mystic
I could not point to any need in childhood as strong as that for a father’s protection.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
—Colette (1873–1954) French Novelist, Performer
The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) American Novelist
When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood.
—Sam Ewing (1949–2018) American Writer, Humorist
Childhood is that wonderful time of life when all you need to do to lose weight is take a bath.
—Unknown
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
Childhood is the sleep of reason.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) Swiss-born French Philosopher
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922) French Novelist
I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
Childhood is the most beautiful of all life’s seasons.
—Unknown
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
—Cynthia Ozick (b.1928) American Novelist, Short-story Writer, Essayist
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
—Abraham Sutzkever (1913–2010) Yiddish Poet, Writer
The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
—Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American Novelist, Journalist, Poet, Essayist
Childhood is a disease—a sickness that you grow out of.
—William Golding (1911–93) English Novelist
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
—Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Russian-born American Composer, Musician
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Poet
Leave a Reply