Children and Childhood Quotes

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. ~ Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy "I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise." ~ The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins Come on back and we'll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark. ~ It by Stephen King Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought. ~ It by Stephen King He seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away. ~ Hard Times by Charles Dickens They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. ~ To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf "Mother says as th' two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way-or always to have it. She doesn't know which is th' worst." ~ The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. ~ Ulysses by James Joyce Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. ~ The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde "I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself." ~ The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte