c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Zombie nerds. They probably had the flyers already made up for this. There was nobody creepier than the zombie nerds, college guys who not only watched zombie movies and read zombie novels and played zombie video games, but actually formed clubs and collected zombie-killing weapons. Gun shops around there actually stocked zombie targets, and special zombie bullets with glow-in-the-dark tips. Not toy bullets, mind you. These guys would go out in the woods and train and shoot and defend to the death their right to stay in childhood until age thirty-five.
— David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It
I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.
— Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord
Hannah ran past, beaming. I remember that feeling--when you're a kid and it's your birthday and for one day everyone makes you feel like the most special person in the world.
— Jojo Moyes, Silver Bay
I prepared to get out of bed, tossing the covers aside, the sheets dank-smelling, gray from my body. I wondered how long it had been since I'd changed them. And then I wondered how often you were supposed to change them. These were the kinds of things you didn't learn. I changed bedclothes after sex, now, finally, and that I only learned a few years ago from a movie on TV: Glenn Close, some thriller, and she'd just had sex and is changing the sheets and I can't remember the rest, because all I was thinking was: Oh, I guess people change sheets after they have sex. It made sense, but I'd never thought of it. I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.
— Gillian Flynn, Dark Places
In an instant he forgot Joe's poem about Japan except the part about 'you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,' and a new sound entered his life, like when he was a kid and he first heard the sound of horses clip-clopping and he asked his mother in wonder, "What's that sound, because I've never heard it before?
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son
It made him wonder if all things taken from their home too soon lost some of their bloom.
— Dan Groat, A Punctual Paymaster
I glanced in the first open door and stopped short. Desks. Four tiny desks. A wall of faded posters of alphabet animals. A blackboard, still showing the ghost of numbers. I blinked, certain I was seeing wrong.Derek nudged my legs, telling me to get moving. I looked at him, and I looked at the classroom.This was where Derek had grown up. Four tiny desks. Four little boys. Four young werewolves.For a second, I could see them—three boys working at the three clustered desks, Derek alone at the fourth, pushed slightly away, hunched over his work, trying to ignore the others.Derek nudged me again, whining softly, and I looked down to see him eyeing the room, every hair on his neck on end, anxious to get away from this place.
— Kelley Armstrong, The Reckoning
I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
— Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
Let's raise children who won't have to recover from their childhoods.
— Pam Leo
People will drive by their high school ten years down the road, just so they can pretend that thinking "not much has changed" is actually true. When really, everything has changed. The air smells the same, but the roads have cracked more. The roads have cracked so much they now look like the skin on a crocodile's back. And all the fields, green in the summers, golden in the autumns, have all been paved over with new reasons to never come back.
— Dave Matthes, Paradise City
If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost in the mountain, doesn't it? And dies in the night, in the cold.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
In our folk nobody has any experience of youth, there’s barely even any time for being a toddler. The children simply don’t have any time in which they might be children........Indeed... there’s simply no way that we would be able to provide our children with a viable childhood, one that is real. Naturally, there are consequences. There’s a certain ever present, not to be liquidated childishness that permeates our folk; We often act in ways that are totally and utterly ridiculous and, indeed, precisely like children we do things that are crazy, letting loose with our assets in a manner that is bereft of all rationality, prodigious in our celebrations, partaking in a light-headed frivolousness that is divorced from all sensibility, and often enough all simply for the sake of some small token of fun, so much do we love having our small amusements. But our folk isn’t only childish, to a certain extent we also age prematurely, childhood and old age mix themselves differently with us than by others. We don’t have any youth, we jump right away into maturity and, then, we remain grown-ups for too long and as a consequence to this there’s a broad shadow of a certain tiredness and a sort of hopelessness that colours our essential nature, a nature that as a whole is otherwise so tenacious and permeated by hope, strong hope. This, no doubt, this is related to why we’re so disinclined toward music—we’re too old for music, so much excitement, so much passion doesn’t sit well with our heaviness;
— Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
The play will begin at six sharp. Parents and family, I hope you'll stay for the PTA meeting that will follow." A few parents coughed in response. George knew that coughing was the adult equivalent of groaning.
— Alex Gino, George
Up there in the sky.Don’t you see him?No, not the moon.The Man in the Moon.He wasn’t always a man.Nor was he always on the moon.He was once a child.Like you.Until a battle,a shooting star,and a lost balloonled him on a quest.Meet the very firstGuardian of Childhood.MiM, the Man in the Moon.
— William Joyce, The Man in the Moon
Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
My days of torment were over, but the damage was done. I conflated the bullies and my bathroom accidents with an inchoate sense that something was wrong with me. I broadcast my sense of otherness through my slumped posture, downcast expression, and extreme timidity. Kids at school called weird so often that after a while I believed them. I hid myself behind a curtain of tangled hair.
— Alysia Abbott, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up.
— Beatrice Rose Roberts, Twin Loyalties: From the Chronicles of Tar Ponds City
It is hard to explain to a privileged child the difference between freedom and captivity. For him, the world functions differently, all rains bear fruits and all men are free. He catches a golden bird and puts it inside a gold cage. He watches it grow, captivated, unaware that with its beautiful body comes a pair of wings that can set it free.
— Kanza Javed, Ashes, Wine and Dust
The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.
— Rebecca McNutt, Super 8: The Sequel to Smog City
We take it for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum.You move as a rower moves: facing backwards. You can see where you've been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir.You'd see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real.You’d know which friendships will last, which days are important, and prepare for upcoming mistakes. You'd go to school, and learn to forget.One by one you'd patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before youmeet and go your separate ways. And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger.You'd become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness.You'd fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything. Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again. You wouldn't have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out.You'd know from the start which week was the happiest you’ll ever be, so you could relive it again and again.You'd remember what home feels like,and decide to move there for good. You'd grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving.You'd try everything one last time, until it all felt new again. And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you’d think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people.You'd start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last.Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood.You'd become generous, and give everything back.Pretty soon you’d run out of things to give, things to say, things to see.By then you'll have found someone perfect; and she'll become your world.And you will have left this world just as you found it. Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.
— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.
— Hanif Kureishi
You can't go home again. Your childhood is lost. The friends of your youth are gone. Your present is slipping away from you. Nothing is ever the same.
— Heraclitus of Ephesus, The fragments of the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on nature; translated from the Greek text of Bywater, with an introd. historical and critical
The Luidaeg sighed and put her arms around me, pulling me close. "Come here," she said. "I need to hold someone, and you need to be held. It's a fair trade. Just for a little while, and then we can go on being what we are." I thought about objecting, but dismissed the idea and nestled against her, enjoying the feeling of security given by knowing someone bigger and stronger than I was would stop anything from hurting me. That's all childhood is, after all: strong arms to hold back the dark, a story to keep the shadows dancing, and a candle to mark the long journey into day. A song to keep the flights of angels at bay. How many miles to Babylon? Sorry. I don't care.
— Seanan McGuire
. . . because we cannot conceive that as we grow up our own minds will become so enlarged and elevated that we ourselves shall then regard as trifling those objects and pursuits we now so fondly cherish, and that, though our companions will no longer join us in those childish pastimes, they will drink with us at other fountains of delight, and mingle their souls with ours in higher aims and nobler occupations beyond our present comprehension, but not less deeply relished or less truly good for that, while yet both we and they remain essentially the same individuals as before.
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
In one terrible instant, that terrible thing happened, the single most tragic experience of my, and just about any, childhood: boredom.
— Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir
What a great and happy place the world was! But you had to be big and grown-up before you could do just what you liked.
— Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings
My cousins had told me dead people came back as Dracula.Draculas got thirsty at night and drank only blood, leaving themilk and juices in the refrigerator for the house owners. I thoughtDraculas were cool, they had some manners. Still I didn’t like theidea of anyone drinking blood.
— Sheeja Jose, Goodbye Girl
In these few seconds Finn lived such a long time, that the marble fell back into the bottom of an exhausted world.
— Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings
The notion of children being "kindergarten ready" is a bizarre oxymoron. It's like saying you have to know how to play the piano before you can learn how to play the piano.
— Peter Campbell
The door is crackedWe used to meetlike water does landnonot thatmore like when skin touches skinkissing fingertipsor when air escapes a lung and is felt across the worldI've leapt over cracks in sidewalksand swallowed away troublesome back painsthat could only be fixed with someone else's pillsWe met by your house one stray dayand you drove me to the baywhere we sat and kissed like it was yesterdayAnd here you told me that you loved meand that you always loved meand that you would always love methe wind blew and I held youYou rested your head on my shoulderand the wind blew warmLater, in your big red truck, we smoked some greenand I kissed you harderand held your breasts, and felt between your legsand with a gaspyou told me you were in love with meAnd then you drove me backand we promised it wouldn't be the endnot this timeThe quill and inkwell on your footI'm a writer and you are my greatest artI returned to my hell and dreamt of you once more
— Dave Matthes, Strange Rainfall on the Rooftops of People Watchers: Poems and Stories
For years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at the university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn't want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
Mom, how come you never go outside?""I told you, I'm a vampire.
— Alison Bechdel
The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.
— Bruno Schulz
They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them.
— Bruno Schulz
For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.
— Anthony M. Esolen
A team goes through stages of birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, maturity, and aging in its development.
— Sunday Adelaja
... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.
— Kate Atkinson
There is nothing romantic about childhood. Children can enjoy their childhood only if the adults create the necessary atmosphere.
— Sadghuru
I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.
— Sylvia Kristel, Undressing Emmanuelle: A Life Stripped Bare
It's funny how much of childhood is about proximity. Like who your best friend is is directly correlated to how close your houses are
—  who you sit next to in music is all about how close your names are in the alphabet. Such a game of chance.
Have you ever loved someone so intensely, so entirely ,that it's painful to be apart from them? I'm not talking about being in a long-distance relationship or even a particularly painful case of unrequited love. I'm talking about being in a completely different world from the other person, a world where you can see them and hear them but you can't touch them and they can't see or hear you.
— Stacey Field, The Life and Afterlife of Charlie Brackwood
You see, I don't think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12….
— C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children
Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what?
— Alison Espach, The Adults
Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Interlude #1
The earliest childhood memories are woven by shadows. And some of these shadows are woven from fire.
— Plamen Chetelyazov, Flaws of Oblivion
I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.
— Jack Kerouac
They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much.
— Alice Hoffman, Blue Diary
So to all who are situated as I am, I would say--Grow up as fast as you can.
— Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918
Often, under the layers of our maturity is a child’s insecurity screaming for love and attention.
— Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain   The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life
I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.
— Dave Matthes, Bar Nights
I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn't understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once.
— Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights.
— Brenda Sutton Rose
The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable.
— David Vann, Aquarium
How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?
— Philip Roth, Everyman
Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.
— Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
I puked rainbows all over my childhood, and it felt so good.
— L.K. Elliott, Confessions of an Ex Hot Mess
I would have dearly liked to close the French doors between us for a bit of peace, but Mam wouldn't allow it; she said that solitude would give me ideas and the last thing a boy of my age needed was ideas.
— John Boyne
The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our chilhood behind.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
My whole life is out here-the whole of my life...I'd come here naked, as a boy-straight from that river out there-throw my clothes on the floor and climb into that loft and lie there dreaming in the hay...All those summer days-scouring the banks of the Avon for smooth, round stones-scaring up ducks and foxes-kingfishers-swallows...somebody's dog...Oh, God-I want it back. Throwing stones that never reached the other shore. And the games-the games-the games, and all my friends...
— Timothy Findley
And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.
— Maya Angelou
Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we're growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free child soul.
— Jirō Taniguchi
I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words. But I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
— Harper Lee
The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
...the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden
The very matrix of our ability to love and bond in later life, maternal sensitivity – or lack thereof – also determines cultural tenor.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution
Harry was a bright boy. And like many bright boys, he had a little mischief in him.
— Patrick Yee, A Boy Named Harry: The Childhood of Lee Kuan Yew
Vivien thought how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn't know the first thing about being brave.
— Kate Morton
A mosaic of memories takes me back to my own childhood, and then to my children. My earliest memory of St. Augustine was a day trip from Jacksonville; a day with some neighbors who were nice enough to purchase me a plastic toy-tugboat with a blue superstructure and white hull. Other accounts meld into my adult years. With its history and attractions, The Ancient City is pristine and picturesque by most accounts; but from the Newer Jail (not the Old Jail) , the perspective is very different.
— H. Kirk Rainer
Children with less opportunities often become adults with more flexibility.
— M.Sriteja
The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.But no matter how long the girl looks, she feels nothing. Puzzled, she looks for the girl who wanted to be an explorer, the girl who wanted to learn deep-sea diving and mountain-climbing, the girl who wanted to travel the stars. But she can't find her. That girl died when her parents did, in a little shop in the slums of November. And now she has no soul left to shatter.She closes the shade over the window.
— Amie Kaufman, This Shattered World
If you ever want to see heaven, watch a bunch of young girls play. They are all sweat and skinned knees. Energy and open faces.
— Amy Poehler
When you're a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.
— John Scalzi, Lock In
And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the summer and I hear the bees buzzing and for a moment I truly am Alice in Wonderland, do you have the heart to tell me I am not?
— John Logan, Peter and Alice
Lenny’s face was smiling, too. For a minute they were both ten years old. Time travel in real life.
— Lynne Rae Perkins, Criss Cross
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
— Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.
— Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did.
— Rick Bragg
Father never approved of my toysSaw them as child's playthingsI was a childThey were my worldI ruled thereAnd he stepped on themDestroying themAnd in turnDestroyed meI should have been left to playNow I must step on everything
— T.P. Louise, Complete World War Robot
Yet I had become very attached to George Roc. I liked him, not for the joy of playing with him, not for some talent that made him stand out from the rest, not even for his kindness: above all, I liked him because he was always sad and because the things he told me caused me a degree of pain.....George Roc was the first being that I'd met who saw and felt himself unhappy.
— Joseph Zobel
All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one.
— Valente, Catherynne
Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.
— Delia Sherman, Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
In a way I haven't quite stopped mourning the end of my childhood.
— Emma Koenig
Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
— John Updike, Rabbit, Run
A preserved childhood is better than a repaired adulthood
— Fabcos Famas
Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and . . . Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and . . . And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling . . . paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody.
— David Almond, My Name Is Mina
Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on the way to the full personhood of the adult… Every lived moment has an eternal significance and already constitutes a fulfilled life. For fulfilled life is not measured by the number of years that have been lived through, or spent in one way or another. It is measured according to the depth of lived experience.
— Jürgen Moltmann
Carelessness was once something to be owned. They wore it around their necks as they joined the springtime breeze while ducking in and out of the forest believing their fairy tale.
— A. Lynn, Itsy's Ugly
What would it be like to feel so attached, so intrinsically bonded, so protective of one’s own best connection with time and the ages, of generations past and future, of another human life, of their time?
— J.R. Tompkins, Price of the Child
The greatest memories a person might have in their life is, childhood. It's really a painful nostalgia.
— Lathish R. Shankar, April Showers Bring May Flowers: Diary of a Ten-Year-Old School Girl
The birth of a new born baby is a great joy.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
And what do I know about humans? Only this: My name is Doloria Maria de la Cruz, and I'm not just the end of childhood. I'm the end of humanity. And if you come from the skies- I'm coming for you.
— Margaret Stohl, Idols
He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves.
— Mark Costello
Childhood is not all candy stores and recess; it’s frustrations and confusions, too.
— Chelsey Philpot
They say adolescent 'best' friendships are like love affairs where we learn the rules of relationships: commitment, trust, loyalty, jealousy, exchange, loss. Not being acquainted with the theories of friendship, Charles and Lise chose each other out of good humoured envy. Each wanted the life of the other.
— Barbara Wels
If You Want To Learn About LOVE,Happiness And Joy, Please Go To Your Childhood and Learn.
— Sushil Singh, व्यस्त लोगों के लिये ध्यान
The only walk of life where you can rightfully chill and run.Celebrate childhood!! Happy Childrens Day!!
— Vidya
If you can’t find any fun during childhood, you naturally won’t look for it as you grow up to maturity. You will grow ‘hard,’ and look upon fun as foolish. Also, if you don’t furnish fun for a child, don’t look for it to grow up bright, happy and loving. So, always put in a child’s path an opportunity to watch, talk about, and know, as many good things as you can.
— Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby
The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself - that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you didn't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air of a tire.
— Stephen King, It
The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things
—  and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...
Summer on the farm was glorious. Peter spent as much time out of doors as possible, and he had many playmates, since all the children were free from their spring and autumn duties of tending crops or going to school. Peter had become the leader of a merry band of youngsters, aged six to fourteen, who followed the Wild Boy wherever he went and seemed to understand his unintelligible noises. If they did not understand, then they pretended to. The life of a princess has many advantages, but I envied those children for their time with Peter and for what seemed to me to be a simple, carefree existence.
— Christopher Daniel Mechling, Peter: The Untold True Story
As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
That's the most terrible thing about being a child; you're convinced that it's all your fault." Lulu
— Ruth Reichl, Delicious!
To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream......if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.
— Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being
Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.
— Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.
— Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation
What I’m suggesting is that the essence of leadership is soundness and that the essence of soundness is soul, which paradoxical as you might think it is, is that child within.
— Tim Macartney-Snape
People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.
— Sylvia Kristel, Undressing Emmanuelle: A Life Stripped Bare
Childhood is a slum and they love it.
— Helen Dunmore, Your Blue Eyed Boy
The foundations of your childhood, they stay with you.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
Never stop screaming, playing and laughing, it's part of our childhood wich will always be with us.
— Romina Noriega
I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention.
— Kenny Guinn
I gave up on ever trying to get 'my way.' I barely knew it existed.
— Roz Chast, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
In an age of iPhones and Playstations, it's great to see that somebody's still rocking the bus-on-a-string.
— Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York
Throughout my entire miserable childhood I woke at least once a night weeping from overwhelming delight. I did it hungry, I did it after beatings, I did it after the deaths of loved ones.Now you tell me if I’m crazy or if I’ve always been blessed.
— Bob Thurber
Art is childhood.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life
No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer.
— Stephen King, The Eyes of the Dragon
I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage.
— Margaret Atwood
She tried so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all.
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
There are only two things that determine whether you're old enough to do something -- whether you understand what the hell you're getting yourself into -- and whether you're willing to accept responsibility for it if it blows up in your face.How many years you've been alive is ultimately meaningless -- except in as much as it gives parents a general sort of idea as to whether their child is likely to understand what they're getting themselves into. Small children, for instance, can't really comprehend shades of grey -- where a decision or choice can have different answers depending on the circumstances. For them, everything is black and white.
— Midnight Blue, The Mirror of Maybe
I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of make believe.
— Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
One day I had nothing but my childhood to defend myself……….
— Sameh Elsayed
On some level, with its carrousels and castle and cowboys, its mysterious jungle and its animated characters, Disneyland is a highly idealized elaboration of our childhoods. It can be seen as a portal through which we revisit (maybe even heal) our youth.
— Leslie Le Mon, The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014 - Disneyland: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Place on Earth
She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Artificial Gods
The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one’s right to privacy.
— Harry Leslie Smith
Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
You see, here's my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
Love may not be enough to wake a child in the morning, dress him, and get him to school, then to feed him at night, bathe him, and put him to bed. Still, can any of us imagine a childhood without it?
— Andrew Bridge, Hope's Boy
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy
One day I had nothing but my childhood to defend myself..........
— Sameh Elsayed
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
— Brian W. Aldiss
Family is not disparate relationships between individuals and machines, in separate rooms of a house. Childhood is not a race to accumulate all of the consumer goods and stresses of adulthood in record time. Simplification signals a change and makes room for transformation. It is a stripping away that invites clarity.
— Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids
I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I’d just been born?
— Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke
That's because we have it so good", I told her, trying on his deep voice. We impersonated him all the way home, laughing and blowing bubbles, both of us knowing that he was right. We did have it so good.
— Emily M. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
The older I get the more I enjoy my childhood…! ~James A. Murphy
— James A. Murphy, The Waves of Life Quotes and Daily Meditations
I would often sit in the corner of the room wearing Dad's massive headphones, carefully replaying the records time after time. It was something I did frequently throughout my childhood with music, comedy and film, inspiring my own creative imagination, the headphones rendering the experience intensely personal, as though it were all happening inside my own head.
— Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well
The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.
— Emily M. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post
With simplification we can bring an infusion of inspiration to our daily lives; set a tone that honors our families' needs before the world's demands. Allow our hopes for our children to outweigh our fears. Realign our lives with our dreams for our family, and our hopes for what childhood could and should be.
— Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids
Childhood is the best period of life...
— Ray
She knew him in that way you can only know a person as a child. Like if you cracked away the adult shell, you'd find that child, happily sitting inside, smiling at you.
— Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake
We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death
— Alexander Herzen, From Other Shore & Russian People & Socialism
You see, when you're young and foolish it doesn't matter where you may be, you always think that you'll be happier somewhere else.
— Felix Salten, Bambi's Children
One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths "for your own good." Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible...
— Robin Wasserman, Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader
I'll love you forever,I'll like you for always,As long as I'm livingmy baby you'll be.
— Robert Munsch, Love You Forever
...because you are not trying simply to complete a set of books or toys or Weetabix cards, you are trying to complete yourself, to get back to the whole person you were before, as a child, before the obstructions and compromises of adulthood got in the way. And yet, all you are really doing is accumulating a pile of crap, souvenirs of the futility of the quest.
— Neil Perryman, Adventures With the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who
You ain’t old yet but when you get old, all the women in the village start to look down on you when they find out you want to do something other than sweep the kitchen or cut up vegetables. Had this big starch mango tree when I was small. Anytime I set myself to climb it, there was always a woman passing by to yell at me and tell me to get down. Asked me why I leaving my poor mother to do all the housework. I never got to the top. It was like God was always watching, ready to send another hag to tell me down. Then, one day, they cut down the tree.
— Kevin Jared Hosein, Rune Mathura and the Case of the Village Jumbie
For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of 'old people' and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end.
— Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude
If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin
— Edna O'Brien, Saints and Sinners
My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
Parts of my 20s and 30s have gone by in a flash but my childhood is with me all the time.
— Sara Sheridan
It’s not until you’re older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember.
— Sara Sheridan, Truth Or Dare
The question should be who do we want to be when we grow up, not what.
— Craig  Stone, The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness
Do you remember the books from our childhood? Those were you could decide yourself what the character should do next?I always loved those books, getting to decide what will happen, being responsible for it.But did you ever decided for something, flipped to the page, read it and then thought: "No, I don't want this to happen!" And then you went back to where it all went wrong and just took a different path.It was always so easy with those books, if you didn't like what was happening you just chose a different path, like pressing rewind till it makes sense again and then hit play.It's not like I am always unhappy with my words, actions or decisions in a situation, but I can't stop wondering how everything would be right now if I had said something different at some point.I guess I will never know but it makes me question my words, decisions and actions right now, because what if I chose wrong and then I don't get what I wish for because of one word or one step?
— Lena Goetz
...nobody was ever really ready to turn off their mother's machine, no matter what they thought; to turn off the light of their childhood and walk away, just as if they were turning out a light and leaving a room.
— Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Over the years our mother has beaten us with belts, shoes, rulers, extension cords, hair brushes, a wooden spoon, a fly swatter, a toilet brush, wire coat hangers, wooden coat hangers and sometimes one of our own toys. When you get whacked by your own paddleball paddle or you have to watch your sister getting spanked with a badminton racquet that she asked Santa Claus (AKA Grandma) to bring, you don't feel much like playing with those things ever again.
— Bob Thurber, Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel
To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times,And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses
Parents who daily read Robert Lewis Stevenson to their children and surrounds them with blocks, plastic animals, and some cardboard boxes or kitchen pots and pans are going to produce a qualitatively different child from those who spend that time on TV or videos, even if their choices ARE only Winnie the Pooh and Mr. Rogers.
— Diane Medved, Saving Childhood
Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.
— Julian Barnes, Talking It Over
They say a happy childhood is a lousy preparation for life. Kids who spend their playground days fat, ginger or gay know the truth.
— Adam Baker, Outpost