The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
—Flannery O'Connor
The great man is he who does not lose his child's-heart.
—Mencius
One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood.
—Agatha Christie in An Autobiography
Certainly I can say that my own childhood was unhappy. This was due to a clash of wills between my mother and myself. My early life was a series of fierce battles, from which my mother invariably emerged the victor. If I could not be seen anywhere, she would say, "Go and find out what Bernard is doing and tell him to stop it."
—Bernard Law Montgomery
Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? She would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.
—Sarah Addison Allen in The Peach Keeper
Too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be twelve years old. They patronize; they treat children as inferiors. Well, I won't do that.
—Walt Disney
When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
—John Steinbeck
Our parents got divorced when we were kids, and it was kind of cool. We got to go to divorce court with them. It was like a game show. My mom won the house and car. We were all excited. My dad got some luggage.
—Tom Arnold
People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
—Bill Watterson
Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.
—Jonathan Tropper in This is Where I Leave You
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice—that is, until we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say, "I lost it."
—Sydney J. Harris
Nature was my kindergarten.
—William Christopher Handy
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.
—Alexander McCall Smith in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
As a child, I lived with being punier than other boys in class. The only consolation was my parents' empathy—they encouraged constant trips to the local drugstore for chocolate milk shakes to fatten me up. The shakes made me happy, but still, all through grammar school, other kids shoved me around.
—James D. Watson
Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.
—Dave Pelzer in A Child Called "It"