Quotations about Childhood

There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again. ~Elizabeth Lawrence


Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows. ~John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells


Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.
~William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"


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, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. ~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860


Childhood is the most beautiful of all life's seasons. ~Author Unknown


Childhood is a promise that is never kept. ~Ken Hill


Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. ~Katherine Anne Porter


There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. ~Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (thanks Harold)


When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood. ~Sam Ewing


In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in. ~Robert Brault,www.robertbrault.com


The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
~Christopher Morley, To a Child


Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected? ~Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin


If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. ~Tom Stoppard


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.
~Lewis Carroll, "Solitude"


It is never too late to have a happy childhood. ~Tom Robbins


What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. ~Cynthia Ozick


The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day.
~John Milton, Paradise Regained


To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation - is there a worst trade one makes in life? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Childhood is a short season. ~Helen Hayes


I leave to children exclusively, but only for the life of their childhood, all and every the dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof, with the right to play among them freely, according to the custom of children, warning them at the same time against the thistles. And I devise to children the yellow shores of creeks and the golden sands beneath the water thereof, with the dragon flies that skim the surface of said waters, and and the odors of the willows that dip into said waters, and the white clouds that float on high above the giant trees. ~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898


In the happiest of our childhood memories, our parents were happy, too. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in in a thousand ways, and the Night, and the trail of the Milky Way to wonder at.... ~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898


I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container. ~Bill Bryson


He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast. ~Herbert Gold


All any child needs is the protection of loving parents and an alternative source of information. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. ~Mark Twain


Childhood is that wonderful time of life when all you need to do to lose weight is take a bath. ~Author Unknown


This, too, is why our life in childhood is so full of infinite significance. Then, all is of equal importance to us; we hear all, we see all, all impressions affect us equally; while, when more advanced in years, we act with more definite ends, busy ourselves more exclusively with details, and laboriously exchange the pure gold of intuition for the paper-money of book definitions, and our lives gain in breadth what they lose in depth and intensity. Now we are grown-up and people of consequence, we are always getting into new houses.... Even our clothes are strange to us, we hardly know how many buttons has the very coat on our back. ~Heinrich Heine, "A Tour in the Harz" (1824), Travel-Pictures, translated from German


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


The world knows how to straighten out a spoiled child but never makes it up to a child deprived. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes. ~Malcolm de Chazal