Childhood is a short season.
The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Great is the man who does not lose his child mind.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.
I still live in and on the sunshine of my childhood.
The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day.
Childhood is a disease—a sickness that you grow out of.
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
Childhood does sometimes pay a second visit to man—youth never.
Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.
But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Just tell me how you judge your childhood and youth, and I will tell you who you are.
Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.
When everything is astonishing, nothing is astonishing; this is how the world is to children.
Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell.
When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.
The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments: tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.
Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
Children are incurable romantics. Brimful of romance and tragedy, we whirl through childhood hopelessly in love with our parents.
Childhood is a thing that happens so early you don't forget it. Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.
Children are an enlarging, if sobering, experience, and often amusing. But childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.
Childhood, n. 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.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in light out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.