Quotes about childhood

His own [childhood] seemed so long ago that it was as is someone had lived it for him.

‘The greatest privilege of childhood’, she said, ‘is to live safely in the present.’

Everything is filled with stories, an old woman neighbour told me once, the same old woman neighbour, as it happens, who taught me to sew. This is when I was extremely little, too little to understand that most things don’t mean exactly what they seem, that meaning is a flighty thing. Because of what she said, I split the seam down the back of my favourite teddy, Mr Buddy, with a serrated kitchen knife. I was searching for stories, commanding words to tumble out and configure into horizontal lines like the ones inside my story books. Instead I found Mr Buddy was all stuffed with minute clouds.

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up

Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

Oh! give us once again the wishing cap

Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat

Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,

And Sabra in the forest with St. George!

The child, whose love is here, at least, doth reap

One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul. (chapter 12)

The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

He had a brief but vivid memory of being seven years old at his grandmother’s vineyard in Nortcoor, looking into the night sky and seeing it for the first time as infinity towering above him like God, only worse because it was real.

The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood.

We lived in fact, throughout our childhoods, easily and unthinkingly crossing thresholds between one place and another—Ain Shams, Zatoun, our school—places that formed their own particular and different worlds with their own particular and different underlying beliefs, ideals, assumptions.

This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.