Childhood Quotes

"Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it"

"The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"Genius is childhood recalled at will"

Charles Baudelaire, Poet

"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, Writer

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

E. B. White, Writer

"I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife"

Patti Smith, Musician

"One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood"

Agatha Christie, Writer

"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

"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 major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely"

Truman Capote, Novelist

"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

"My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college"

Philip Zimbardo, Psychologist

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book"

Marcel Proust, Author

"All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views"

Samuel Richardson, Novelist

"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, Poet

"Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality"

Dennis Potter, Dramatist

"I don't remember the first half of my life. All I say is a happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life"

Kinky Friedman, Musician

"The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood"

Dennis Potter, Dramatist

"I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well"

Angela Merkel, Statesman

"It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like"

Maya Lin, Architect

"My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London"

Peter Shaffer, Playwright

"Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum"

Thomas Szasz, Psychologist

"There must be a law against forcing children to perform at an early age. Children should have a wonderful childhood. They should not be given too much responsibility"

Maria Callas, Musician

"Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me"

Hakeem Olajuwon, Athlete

"The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose"

Garrison Keillor, Writer

"I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies"

Stanislav Grof, Psychologist

"I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news"

Alma Guillermoprieto, Journalist

"When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood"

Sam Ewing, Athlete

"Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres"

Hector Hugh Munro, Novelist

"I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart, such as I have felt it since my childhood"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All, all are gone, the old familiar faces"

Charles Lamb, Critic

"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

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

Kurt Cobain, Musician

"My childhood was appalling"

Taylor Caldwell, Author

"I was an escapee of childhood. I always wanted to grow up"

Uma Thurman, Actress

"People ask 'do you make a conscious effort not to swear?' - if you're doing silly stuff you're not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood, who were funny without swearing, were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway"

Tim Vine, Comedian

"Childhood obesity is best tackled at home through improved parental involvement, increased physical exercise, better diet and restraint from eating"

Bob Filner, Politician

"Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden"

Gerald Scarfe, Artist

Page 2 of 7