Childhood Quotes: Timeless Memories and Nostalgic Wisdom

"A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost"

Marion C. Garretty, Poet

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will"

Arthur Rimbaud, Poet

"A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older"

Tom Stoppard, Dramatist

"Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood"

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosopher

"Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of"

William Golding, Novelist

"Childhood is a short season"

Helen Hayes, Actress

"Childhood is a promise that is never kept"

Ken Hill, Playwright

"The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind"

E. B. White, Writer

"That great Cathedral space which was childhood"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age"

Walter Savage Landor, Poet

"My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night"

Lee Grant, Actress

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"Doctor Who was a big part of my childhood so it was a great honour to be in it"

Simon Pegg, Comedian

"I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood"

Manuel Puig, Author

"From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy"

Bernard Berenson, Historian

"To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams"

Giorgio de Chirico, Artist

"Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness"

Henri Frederic Amiel, Philosopher

"I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy"

Tyler Perry, Actor

"Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die"

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosopher

"Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood"

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author

"To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days"

Plutarch, Philosopher

"It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age"

Margaret Mead, Scientist

"I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me"

Kurt Cobain, Musician

"My whole career has been fulfilling my childhood fantasies, playing characters that are larger than life, getting to play a knight, an elf, a prince, and a soldier"

Orlando Bloom, Actor

"The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat"

John Le Carre, Author

"There was a special challenge in describing the awful childhood of a person who happens to be my own husband. It was very painful at times, for both of us"

Pamela Stephenson, Actress

"Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do"

John Le Carre, Author

"I think childhood is to everyone a lost land"

Dennis Potter, Dramatist

"From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else"

John Philip Sousa, Musician

"I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"The most important influence in my childhood was my father"

DeForest Kelley, Actor

"Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age"

Lydia M. Child, Activist

"Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood"

Fred Rogers, Celebrity

"I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid"

Patrick Stewart, Actor

"Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood"

Louise J. Kaplan

"That said, let me add that Joan and I never want him to be a child actor. We both feel that it takes away their childhood and puts untold pressure on children"

Dwayne Hickman, Actor

"My parents didn't want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood"

Harry Shearer, Actor

"I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away"

Harriet Ann Jacobs, Writer

"Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains"

Diane Ackerman, Poet

Page 1 of 7