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Childhood can be a wonderful and magical time …

• My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood. Gerald Durrell
• The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give. Ellen Glasgow
• We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. George Eliot
• Raising children,  Nurture your inner child,  Youth

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… a time of great happiness

• A happy childhood can’t be cured. Mine’ll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that’s all, instead of a noose.  Hortense Calisher
• And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in in a thousand ways, and the Night, and the trail of the Milky Way to wonder at…. Williston Fish
• Happiness,  Joy

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Childhood is a time of enjoying the outdoors …

• Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood. Pablo Neruda
• I leave to children exclusively, but only for the life of their childhood, all and every of the dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof, with the right to play among them freely, according to the custom of children, warning them at the same time against the thistles. And I devise to children the yellow shores of creeks and the golden sands beneath the water thereof, with the dragon flies that skim the surface of said waters, and and the odours of the willows that dip into said waters, and the white clouds that float on high above the giant trees. Williston Fish
• There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colours are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again. Elizabeth Lawrence

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… playing in the snow …

• One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day. Susan Orlean
• When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge- egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms. Eudora Welty
• Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood. Andy Goldsworthy
• Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow. Margaret Atwood
• Snow

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… and on the beach

• I honestly think the beach is the only place children actually entertain themselves. Donna McLavy
• Hunt for beauty like a child looking for seashells on a bountiful beach. Rick Hanson
• To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me. Sir Isaac Newton
• Play in the sand; splash in the water; get dirty; get wet. The beach is the only place my mom doesn’t get mad about me doing that stuff. Of course, I love the beach! Dixie Dykens (age 5)
• Don’t grow up too quickly, lest you forget how much you love the beach. Michelle Held
• The beach

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Childhood is a time of savouring simple joys and pleasures

• I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy. Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• Savour life’s simple joys

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Childhood is a time of being alive and aware

• The time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness. Edna O’Brien
• Being fully alive,  Awareness

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Childhood is a time of being fully in the senses

• Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows. John Betjeman
• I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood… Yves Klein
• The senses

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Childhood is a time to play

• Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity. Kay Renfield Jamison
• My childhood may be over, but that doesn’t mean playtime is. Ron Olson
• 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.  Fred Rogers
• Play is the business of childhood, and its continuation in later years is the prolongation of youth. Walter Rauschenbach
• Play

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Childhood is a time for story telling

• It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. S. Lewis
• The Babar the Elephant book is sitting in front of me. I pick it up and start reading it. I remember reading it as a small Boy and enjoying it and imagining that I was friends with Babar, his constant Companion during all of his adventures. He went to the moon, I went with him. He fought Tomb Raiders in Egypt, I fought alongside him. He rescued his elephant girlfriend from Ivory Hunters on the Savanna, I coordinated the getaway. I loved that goddamn Elephant and I loved being his friend. In a childhood full of unhappiness and rage, Babar is one of the few pleasant memories that I have. Me and Babar, kicking some motherfucking ass. James J. Frey
• Stories

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Childhood is a time to discover the joys of reading

• At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book–that string of confused, alien ciphers– shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Alberto Manguel
• Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood. Jane Yolen
• There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. Marcel Proust
• My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don’t read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children’s rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent’s rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says ‘PRIVATE- -GROWNUPS KEEP OUT’: a child sprawled on the bed, reading. Anne Fadiman
• Reading,  Books

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Childhood is a time of wonder and astonishment

• Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.  Eugene Ionesco
• The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.  Eugene Ionesco
• To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation – is there a worst trade one makes in life? Robert Brault
• Wonder

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Childhood is a time when we don’t fret about the future …

• When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind. Patrick Rothfuss
• Worry

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… living fully in the present

• Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do. Jean de la Bruyere
• Be like a joyous child living gloriously in the ever present Now without a single worry or concern about even the next moment of time. Eileen Caddy
• Live in the present

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Childhood is a time of unrestrained laughter

• There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter – – loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man. Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life. Sir William Osler
• What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence. Martha Beck
• Laughter

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Childhood is a time of great creativity

• Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death. Rollo May
• Creativity

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Childhood is a time of eagerness and adventure

• In that world, you’ll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. Ayn Rand
• There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. Mark Twain
• Adventure

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Childhood is a time of natural spontaneity which should be encouraged

• We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child’s spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendour during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life. Maria Montessori
• Spontaneity

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Childhood is a time of dreams

• It’s a thrill to fulfil your own childhood dreams, but as you get older, you may find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun. Randy Pausch
• 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. Ben Okri
• Dreams

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Childhood is a time of development and learning

• Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. Flannery O’Connor
• Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. Katherine Anne Porter
• Childhood’s learning is made up of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse. Eudora Welty
• Growth,  Learning

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Childhood is a time of curiosity

• A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions. Frederick Seitz
• Childhood and genius have the same master-organ in common – inquisitiveness. Edwin Bulwar- Lytton
• Curiosity

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Childhood is a time for friendships of the most precious kind

• You can go through life and make new friends every year – every month practically – but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel. Alexander McCall Smith
• Friendship

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Childhood is a kind of genius …

• Genius is childhood recaptured. Charles Baudelaire
• Genius is the recovery of childhood at will. Arthur Rimbaud
• Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. Charles Baudelaire
• Genius

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… something precious we should try not to lose

• God has sent children into the world, not only to replenish it, but to serve as sacred reminders of something ineffably precious which we are always in danger of losing. The sacrament of childhood is thus a continuing revelation. Elton Trueblood
• Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another. Scott Fitzgerald

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We should endeavour to carry our childhood with us …

• If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. Tom Stoppard
• It is never too late to have a happy childhood. Tom Robbins
• So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. Gaston Bachelard
• Remain young at heart

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… to keep the spirit of childhood alive

• Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. S. Lewis

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Childhood is a time of great possibility …

• Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibilities, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me …Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. Shel Silverstein
• That’s what makes it so right. Your eyes—your soul is there, but the rest of you is still so undefined. That’s the beauty of childhood. The eyes show everything you’ve seen so far, but the rest of you is still so open to possibility, to whatever you might become. Bree Despain
• Possibility

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… and promise …

• Childhood is a promise that is never kept. Ken Hill
• We all know individuals who did not fulfill the promise they showed in childhood. Many of them became haunted by the image of what they might have become. Instead of blaming fate, I think we should accept ourselves as we are and try to fulfill whatever dreams are within our capability. Michio Kaku

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… for young children are still a blank slate

• Unfortunately, we’re used to thinking of childhood as a period of blindness and inadequacy, not as the richest time of all. And yet, to convince yourself that it’s so all you have to do is look carefully into the eyes of a new-born baby.  Try it if you get the chance; forget preconceptions and observe the child closely.  How do the eyes seem to you?  Empty, unconscious?  Or ancient, distant, wise?  Babies naturally know how to breathe deeply; it’s we adults who have lost this ability.  At the age of four or five I had as yet learned nothing about God or religion, nor about any of the fine messes people have made in their name.  Susanna Tamaro

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Childhood is a time when time seems to stretch forever …

• Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes. Malcolm de Chazal
• Sweet childish days, that were as long as twenty days are now. William Wordsworth
• Time is a game played beautifully by children. Heraclitus of Ephesus

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… yet in reality, childhood is a season that passes in a flash

• Childhood is a short season. Helen Hayes
• Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well. George R.R. Martin
• Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting. Richard Paul Evans
• As I accepted the change of the golden hair of my childhood to the reddish-brown hair of my youth without regret, so I also accept my silver hair — and I am ready to accept the time when my hair and the rest of my clay garment returns to the dust from which it came… Each season of life is wonderful if you have learned the lessons of the season before. It is only when you go on with lessons unlearned that you wish for a return.  Peace Pilgrim
• It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the play-things of childhood. Samuel Johnson
• Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age. Vera Nazarian
• There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. Graham Greene
• The fleetingness of life

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Leaving childhood behind can feel like a great loss

• Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? Agatha would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss. Sarah Addison
• He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast. Herbert Gold
• People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn’t want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you’d be married and you’d own a farm with about a million chickens on it.” They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Heather O’Neill
• When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you. Gail Carson Levine
• Loss

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Some argue that in today’s world, the innocence of childhood is all too short

• Mentally, emotionally, and physically, the human being is designed for a long childhood, followed by a short adolescence and then adulthood–the state of responsible, self-reliant wholeness. What we see our children experiencing now, however, is an ever-shorter childhood, followed by a premature, prolonged adolescence from which ever fewer seem to be emerging. Benjamin Hoff

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Childhood can be a treasure trove of memories …

• A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.  Carol Shields
• And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses – would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Rainer Maria Rilke
• In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in. Robert Brault
• What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. Cynthia Ozick
• Memory

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… memories of parents and family …

• I sit quietly and think about my mom. It’s funny how memory erodes; if all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out. Audrey Niffenegger
• In the happiest of our childhood memories, our parents were happy, too. Robert Brault
• The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose. Garrison Keillor

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… memories of food …

• Most of us have fond memories of food from our childhood. Whether it was our mom’s homemade lasagna or a memorable chocolate birthday cake, food has a way of transporting us back to the past. Homaro Cantu
• Food

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… memories of Christmas …

• At Christmastime, children play an essential part in our celebrations. So much of what we do is intended to please them–and all the while our hearts keep hearkening back to the Christmas memories of our own childhoods.  On Christmas Eve, sometimes we can’t help but envy our children the stars in their eyes, especially when our own eyes are dull with exhaustion.  Christmas is so much simpler for a child.  Can we open our tired, adult eyes to that same simplicity?  Ellen Sanna
• It is the one season of the year when we can lay aside all gnawing worry, indulge in sentiment without censure, assume the carefree faith of childhood, and just plain “have fun.” Whether they call it Yuletide, Noel, Weinachten, or Christmas, people around the earth thirst for its refreshment as the desert traveller for the oasis.  D. Monroe
• Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time. Laura Ingalls Wilder
• The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood. Richard Paul Evans
• Christmas

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… memories that a smell can transport us back to in a second

• Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains. Diane Ackerman
• The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected.  Stephen Lacey

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Childhood memories often make us feel nostalgic

• When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood. Sam Ewing
• People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children. Bill Watterson
• Nostalgia

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Some childhoods can be painful and even damaging  …

• . . . it is true, even people with painful childhoods. . . grow up to be more interesting people. So, there’s always a positive to a negative. Barbra Streisand
• …after all, who isn’t a survivor from the wreck of childhood? Nicole Krauss
• One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. John le Carré
• When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together. John Berger
• All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair. Mitch Albom
• Pain,  Suffering

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… and healing childhood wounds can be one of the great challenges of adulthood

• I do believe, however, that as adults we must reach a point of reconciliation with our stories. Eventually we come to a fork in the road when we’re faced with a choice. Is our story just a story — or is it who we are? If we continue to allow our childhood pain, or any pain for that matter, to define us and serve as the reason for living a compromised life, then we’ll forever be stuck in a victim mentality.   Barrie Davenport
• It is now safe for me to release all of my childhood traumas and move into love. Louise L. Hay
• Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We *told* you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbours, and we will deal with libel later on. Anne Lamott
• Studies have shown that self-compassion has many benefits, including reducing self-criticism, lowering stress hormones like cortisol, increasing self-soothing, self-encouragement, and other aspects of resilience and helping to heal any shortages of caring from others in your childhood. Rick Hanson
• Healing

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Childhood shapes who we are, for better or worse

• Adulthood is when the ghosts of childhood appear. Terri Guillemets
• All of us are products of our childhood. Michael Jackson
• 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
• You are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood. However, as an adult, you are one hundred percent responsible for fixing it. Ken Keyes, Jr.

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Childhood shapes our lives

• The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood. Loren Eiseley

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Childhood shapes our attitudes and beliefs

• Most of our beliefs are inherited from childhood and we never even chose to believe them. Don Miguel Ruiz
• That’s when I learned that you don’t have to be saddled for life with mental attitudes you adopted in childhood. All of us are free to change our minds, and as we change our minds, our experiences will also change.  M J Ryan
• If you have a belief that the people who love you will leave you, then sure enough, it will happen. Over and over again. So you had better become aware of your unconscious beliefs. They are creating your experience of life. They are based on your past experiences, and mostly they are formed in your early childhood. As long as these beliefs remain unconscious, there is no way to be released from them. Leonard Jacobson
• Attitude.  Belief

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Childhood shapes our thought patterns

• It takes some effort to shift our thought patterns. We are conditioned from earliest childhood to focus on the things we want to avoid, rather than the things we want to achieve. We are given reasons why something can’t work rather than why it can. We are told we can’t do things far more often than we are told we can, and we learn to look at what’s wrong with a situation rather than what’s right.  Amanda Harvey

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Childhood shapes our vices

• Isn’t that what makes most people greedy? Fear?  For some people, their greed is a result of something that’s happened in childhood, something they were deprived of, something they didn’t get.  Because of this lack in their lives, they feel that they have to hold on to everything they possibly can.  Tom Walsh
• Vice

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Childhood can contain stints of great boredom

• Though we all know what boredom is, most normal adults do not experience sheer boredom very often. We are stressed, rushed, and worried, but we are seldom purely bored–in part because we are so stressed, rushed, and worried. Time without anything we must attend to usually feels like a breather, not like a monotony. To get a feel for what sheer boredom is like, we must hearken back to childhood. Children and adolescents are frequently bored, so bored they can hardly even stand it. Their perfectly normal developmental need for constant stimulation, for exploring and ongoing learning, is often thwarted in a world of long trips, rainy afternoons, and study halls. In childhood, boredom can be excruciating, like a chronic spiritual headache, or a powerful thirst with no beverage to be had. It can hurt so bad that the poor kid feels like yelling out loud, or throwing something noisy at a wall. Extreme boredom is arguably a form of pain. Martha Stout
• Boredom

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• According to a British poll, you’ve only got a one in five chance of achieving your childhood career ambition. Which probably explains why you don’t run into that many cowboys, princesses, or space rangers. Jay Leno
• Childhood is like being drunk, everyone remembers what you did, except you.
• Childhood is that wonderful time of life when all you need to do to lose weight is take a bath.
• Childhood: 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.  Ambrose Bierce
• I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted – stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container. Bill Bryson
• It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. Tom Robbins
• Just trying to give my kids a few childhood memories they don’t have to repress…
• Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood. Jane Yolen
• My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own parenthood but it didn’t because parenting can be learned only by people who have no children. Bill Cosby
• My kids refuse to eat anything that hasn’t danced on TV. Erma Bombeck
• People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children. Bill Watterson
• Sometimes I wish I had a terrible childhood, so that at least I’d have an excuse. Jimmy Fallon
• The first 40 years of childhood are always the hardest.
• The four stages of a man are infancy childhood adolescence and obsolescence. Art Linkletter
• The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose. Garrison Keillor
• There are three terrible ages of childhood – 1 to 10 10 to 20 and 20 to 30.   Cleveland Amory
• What a childhood I had why when I took my first step my old man tripped me! Rodney Dangerfield
• What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence. Martha Beck
• Why is psychoanalysis a lot quicker for men than for women? When it’s time to go back to his childhood, he’s already there.
• Youth: That brief period, as distinguished from childhood or middle age, when the sexes talk to each other at a party.

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