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Childhood Quotations




Maya Angelou (top)
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
- Maya Angelou


Margaret Atwood (top)
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
- Margaret Atwood


Unknown Author (top)
A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.
- Unknown Author
A characteristic of the normal child is he doesn't act that way very often.
- Unknown Author
Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
- Unknown Author


Robert Benchley (top)
In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.
- Robert Benchley


Ambrose Bierce (top)
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


Jean de La Bruyère (top)
Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selfish, lazy, flighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in expressing joy and sorrow, especially about trifles, they'll do anything to avoid pain but they enjoy inflicting it: little men already.
- Jean de La Bruyère


Pearl S. Buck (top)
If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.
- Pearl S. Buck


Lewis Carroll (top)
I am fond of children - except boys.
- Lewis Carroll


Malcolm de Chazal (top)
Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.
- Malcolm de Chazal


Frank A. Clark (top)
There's nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.
- Frank A. Clark


Phyllis Diller (top)
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
- Phyllis Diller


George Eliot (top)
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.
- George Eliot


Ralph Waldo Emerson (top)
A child is a curly dimpled lunatic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson


Ellen Glasgow (top)
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


Edgar Watson Howe (top)
If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.
- Edgar Watson Howe


Franklin P. Jones (top)
Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.
- Franklin P. Jones
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
- Franklin P. Jones


Fran Lebowitz (top)
Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.
- Fran Lebowitz


Mignon McLaughlin (top)
Women gather together to wear silly hats, eat dainty food, and forget how unresponsive their husbands are. Men gather to talk sports, eat heavy food, and forget how demanding their wives are. Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun.
- Mignon McLaughlin


Christopher Morley (top)
We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.
- Christopher Morley


Robert Orben (top)
Do your kids a favor - don't have any.
- Robert Orben


Cynthia Ozick (top)
What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
- Cynthia Ozick


Dorothy Parker (top)
The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.
- Dorothy Parker


Katherine Anne Porter (top)
Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
- Katherine Anne Porter


Francois de la Rochefoucauld (top)
Youth is a perpetual intoxication; it is a fever of the mind.
- Francois de la Rochefoucauld


Jean Jacques Rousseau (top)
You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau


George Bernard Shaw (top)
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
- George Bernard Shaw


Benjamin Spock (top)
There are only two things a child will share willingly - communicable diseases and his mother's age.
- Benjamin Spock


William Stafford (top)
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
- William Stafford


Thomas Szasz (top)
In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.
- Thomas Szasz


Rabindranath Tagore (top)
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore


Bill Vaughan (top)
A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.
- Bill Vaughan


Henny Youngman (top)
What is a home without children? Quiet.
- Henny Youngman