Explore Quotes on Childhood

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own.

Through play, we renew contact with childhood – My art is childlike.

CHILDHOOD: The rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.

We have common enemies today. It's called childhood poverty. It's called cancer. It's called AIDS. It's called Parkinson's. It's called Muscular Dystrophy.

Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic / alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life.

I believe there are few whose view of life has not been affected by the stern or kindly influences of their early childhood, which threw them in upon themselves in timidity and reserve, or drew them out in genial confidence and sympathy with their fellow creatures.

If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

I am fairly certain that my independent, high-spirited grandmother must have had a childhood similar to Betsy Ray'sAs I read about the School Entertainment and ice cream socials, about ladies leaving calling cards and the milkman with his horse-drawn wagon, I felt that I was having an unexpected and welcome peek into Granny's childhood-a gift to me from Maud Hart Lovelace

Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime. The fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets—a connotation of moon and tides—the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea foam and billowy cloud crystallized in a pipe of fancy.

This is the first great problem of modern democracy...how to get a fair living by reasonable hours of work leaving enough leisure for both childhood and manhood.

An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art. _x000D_ The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.

What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Those of us who had a perfectly happy childhood should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or a gun, like many of my childhood friends did... most of whom were murdered or put in prison... but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognize me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself, which has proved to be so.

Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have a legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

I had a wonderful childhood, which is tough because it's hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood.

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.