“How can we preserve our planet on which little girls are supposed to sleep in their beds, and not lie dead on the road with unplaited pigtails? And so that childhood would never again be called war-time childhood.”

“To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl;”

“So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood.”

“Softened by Time's consummate plush,How sleek the woe appearsThat threatened childhood's citadelAnd undermined the years! Bisected now by bleaker griefs,We envy the despair That devastated childhood's realm, So easy to repair.”

“We must experience certain things in life, even in our childhood, so we can later look back and value the journey.”

“Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures: ‘tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil”