108 Inspirational Childhood Quotes

Childhood is a treasure trove of curiosity, imagination, and endless possibilities. These formative years are not only a time for play and adventure but also a period when life's foundational lessons start to take shape. Inspirational quotes from childhood often capture this magical time, resonating with wisdom that can uplift and motivate us throughout our lives. In this collection, we've curated 108 of the most heartwarming and thought-provoking quotes that reflect the innocence, wonder, and inherent wisdom found in childhood. Whether you're seeking a dose of nostalgia or motivation, these quotes are sure to inspire and remind you of the beauty in simplicity and the power of a child's perspective.

1. “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

2. “Puff, the Magic Dragon, lived by the sea, and frolicked in the Autumn Mist in a land called Honah Lee, little Jacky Paper loved that rascal Puff, and gave him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.” - Peter Yarrow

3. “[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” - Jim Henson

4. “Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.” - Tom Stoppard

5. “Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the future.We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sakeof those with nothing left but their grownupness.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

6. “Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.” - Audrey Niffenegger

7. “I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.” - Madeleine L'Engle

8. “Each month is gay,Each season nice,When eatingChicken soupWith rice” - Maurice Sendak

9. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?” - Stephen King

10. “If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.” - Johan Huizinga

11. “What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.” - Margaret Atwood

12. “Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God.” - Scott Dikkers

13. “...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?” - Nicole Krauss

14. “The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous” - John le Carré

15. “I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.” - John Steinbeck

16. “The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.” - Jane Smiley

17. “There's a great power of imagination about these little creatures, and a creative fancy and belief that is very curious to watch . . . I am sure that horrid matter-of-fact child-rearers . . . do away with the child's most beautiful privilege. I am determined that Anny shall have a very extensive and instructive store of learning in Tom Thumbs, Jack-the-Giant-Killers, etc.” - William Makepeace Thackeray

18. “So was I once myself a swinger of birches.And so I dream of going back to be.” - Robert Frost

19. “Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.” - Ally Condie

20. “(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.” - André Breton

21. “I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen” - Marisa de los Santos

22. “The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.” - Ivan Klíma

23. “Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.” - Ali Shaw

24. “We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.” - Ben Okri

25. “Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. ” - John Updike

26. “Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?” - Richard Paul Evans

27. “I love the stillness of the wood; I love the music of the rill:I love the couch in pensive moodUpon some silent hill. Scarce heard, beneath yon arching trees, The silver-crested ripples pass; and, like a mimic brook, the breezeWhispers among the grass. Here from the world I win release, Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude, Break into mar the holy peace Of this great solitude. Here may the silent tears I weepLull the vested spirit into rest, As infants sob themselves to sleep Upon a mothers breast. But when the bitter hour is gone,And the keen throbbing pangs are still, Oh, sweetest then to couch aloneUpon some silent hill!To live in joys that once have been, To put the cold world out of sight,And deck life's drear and barren sceneWith hues of rainbow-light. For what to man the gift of breath, If sorrow be his lot below; If all the day that ends in deathBe dark with clouds of woe?Shall the poor transport of an hourRepay long years of sore distress—The fragrance of a lonely flower Make glad the wilderness? Ye golden house of life's young spring, Of innocence, of love and truth!Bright, beyond all imagining, Thou fairy-dream of youth!I'd give all wealth that years have piled, The slow result of Life's decay, To be once more a little childFor one bright summer's day.” - Lewis Carroll

28. “No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a leg blown off, and for days, even weeks after it happened, they could still feel the arm itching, the leg itching, the mother calling.” - Pat Cunningham Devoto

29. “What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.” - Sylvia Plath

30. “Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope.” - D. E. Stevenson

31. “DEAR MISS MANNERS:I a tired of being treated like a child. My father says it's because I am a child--I am twelve-and-a-half years old--but it still isn't fair. If I go into a store to buy something, nobody pays any attention to me, or if they do, it's to say, "Leave that alone," "Don't touch that," although I haven't done anything. My money is as good as anybody's, but because I am younger, they feel they can be mean to me. It happens to me at home, too. My mother's friend who comes over after dinner sometimes, who doesn't have any children of her own and doesn't know what's what, likes to say to me, "Shouldn't you be in bed by now,dear?" when she doesn't even know what my bedtime is supposed to be. Is there any way I can make these people stop?GENTLE READER:Growing up is the best revenge.” - Judith Martin

32. “My mother would say, 'Why are you always playing alone?' And I would say, 'I'm not playin', Ma. I'm fuckin' serious!” - George Carlin

33. “I was a hip kid. When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show.” - George Carlin

34. “I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper. And, of course, after that it's just a small step to full-blown sociopath.” - George Carlin

35. “At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.” - Jean Cocteau

36. “Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.” - Stefan Zweig

37. “It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.” - John W. Gardner

38. “You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home” - Sue Monk Kidd

39. “He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, somehow. But the PROCESS – how he put together a story about the world’s workings – that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more PART of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be opaque as a rock.” - David Wroblewski

40. “I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.” - Anne Lamott

41. “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” - Anne Lamott

42. “The truth of the matter was something much more subtle and tremendous than any plain physical miracle could ever be. But never mind that. The important thing was that, when I did see the stars (riotously darting in all directions according to the caprice of their own wild natures, yet in every movement confirming the law), the whole tangled horror that had tormented me finally presented itself to me in its truth and beautiful shape. And I knew that the first, blind stage of my childhood had ended.” - Olaf Stapledon

43. “Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up” - Stephen King

44. “When you're a kid, you tend to see the best in your mates. Because at least they're not as bad as your parents.” - Camilla Way

45. “The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

46. “Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents...” - J.M. Barrie

47. “Nonsense. Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older, and then before you know it, they're grown.” - J.M. Barrie

48. “I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.” - Maurice Sendak

49. “As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls.” - Tao Lin

50. “I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they'd just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn't translate through sports, or music, dancing, carpentry, plumbing. I was the bookish kid, more at home in the pages of a fantasy than in the room in the town on the planet.” - Steve Rasnic Tem

51. “To Alef, the letterthat begins the alphabetsof both Arabic and Hebrew-two Semitic languages,sisters for centuries.May we find the languagethat takes usto the only home there is - one another's hearts....Alef knowsThat a threadOf a storyStitches togetherA wound.” - Ibtisam Barakat

52. “The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet - her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws - and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand. ("The Pool")” - Daphne du Maurier

53. “They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.” - Maud Hart Lovelace

54. “What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?” - Dan Simmons

55. “In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love.But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves.In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning.” - Marjorie Spock

56. “Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.” - Lauren Groff

57. “Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.” - Heather O'Neill

58. “I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change.” - Monty Roberts

59. “Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

60. “I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway... let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves.” - C. JoyBell C.

61. “Later, when you're grown up, you realize you never really get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that's it.” - Mindy Kaling

62. “Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?” - Annie Ernaux

63. “I know what I really want for Christmas.I want my childhood back.Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child, of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of or hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded and terribly vulnerable to joy.” - Robert Fulghum

64. “This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.” - Franny Billingsley

65. “The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun islike a yellow hole. . .” - Markus Zusak

66. “In a child's eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.” - N.K. Jemisin

67. “Where ignorance is bliss,'Tis folly to be wise.- Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” - Thomas Gray

68. “It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.” - Pat Conroy

69. “Vreau să trăiţi din plin, viu, agitat, nervos, liber aceşti ani neasemuiţi, aceşti ani în care visul şi fantezia nu ţin seama de niciun obstacol, în care orice bătaie a inimii se dăruie întregii lumi.” - Constantin Chirita

70. “Tuesday, November 17th. 1896...I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense.” - Beatrix Potter

71. “I know,” said Peter. “Perhaps better than anyone. But you can’t stay a child forever. To choose to speak into Echo’s Well is to choose illusion. To choose to avoid the responsibilities of being an adult. The real trick—the real choice—is to keep the best of the child you were, without forgetting when you grow up.“It is the best of both worlds, Jack. Being a child is to believe in magic everywhere…“…but even Peter Pan had to grow up one day.” - James A. Owen

72. “Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.” - Francine Prose

73. “Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.” - Armistead Maupin

74. “And that's when I heard the whisper in my heart's ear: "It's not about your childhood. It's about who you are!” - C. JoyBell C.

75. “It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these” - Neil Gaiman

76. “I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.” - Margaret Atwood

77. “When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” - Margery Williams Bianco

78. “We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.” - Italo Calvino

79. “That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.” - Italo Calvino

80. “My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.” - Charles Dickens

81. “It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.” - China Miéville

82. “If we truly detach from our childhood and abandon our inherent romanticism, then we shred any bit of humanity left in us.” - Evan Meekins

83. “It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

84. “Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.” - Lew Wallace

85. “You can keep going on much less attention than you crave.” - Idries Shah

86. “Looking' his last' upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing 'she' could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips.” - Mark Twain

87. “Tentei não fazer nada na minha vida que envergonhasse a criança que fui.Quando me for deste mundo, partirão duas pessoas. Sairei de mão dada, com essa criança que fui.” - José Saramago

88. “Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason.The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless.Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau

89. “Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.” - Anthony Horowitz

90. “Tous les enfants essaient de compenser la séparation du sevrage par des conduites de séduction et de parade; on oblige le garçon à dépasser ce stade, on le délivre de son narcissisme en le fixant sur son pénis; tandis que la fillette est confirmée dans cette tendance à se faire objet qui est commune à tous les enfants.” - Simone de Beauvoir

91. “I tried to show him things, but he didn't seem to study what I showed him. Usually, he just put whatever I handed him in his mouth. He would try to eat anything. I fed him Tabasco sauce and he yelled. Having a little brother helped me learn to relate to other people. Being a little brother, Snort learned to watch what he put in his mouth.” - John Elder Robison

92. “Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.” - Mark Twain

93. “So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

94. “I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that I worried a lot” - David Foster Wallace

95. “In the tell-me-again times, (…) when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud, a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon that we shared. I could stretch out like a five-pointed star and then she'd bundle me back up in her arms. I'd wake in the morning tangled in her hair.” - Erica Lorraine Scheidt

96. “Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.” - John Irving

97. “I missed my mother and Elysius. It wasn't that I wanted them with me at that very moment. I wanted them in the past. I wanted to have back just one sunny afternoon together.” - Bridget Asher

98. “It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.” - T.H. White

99. “Childhood was the past. It couldn't be changed, only remembered.” - Aleatha Romig

100. “She looked at me for a second and said, "Oh, never mind. I guess it's true what Mom said? That you've led a sheltered life?"I said I thought the description fairly apt.” - Susan Hubbard

101. “A child playing with its father screams louder, laughs harder, jumps more eagerly, puts more faith in everything.” - Lydia Netzer

102. “I try to cherish the moments I have, for I dread the day I get out of the tub and the wrinkles won't go away...” - Gabe A. Lopez

103. “What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.” - Annie Dillard

104. “It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.” - L.R. Knost

105. “Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, and supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill.” - Annie Dillard

106. “I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.” - Sylvia Plath

107. “Nothing is more foreign than the world of one's childhood when one has truly left it.” - Pär Lagerkvist

108. “I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that, too, but I wouldn't understand why. I would site there with the tight elastic thread of the birthday hat parting the pudge of my underchin, with the grainy frosting of the cake bluing my teeth, and I would try to figure out why it was fun.” - Gillian Flynn