Quotes about Childhood

There, just inside the gates, was Mary. He was only six, but even then he knew that never would he see again anything so beautiful. She was five; but there was something in her manner of holding herself and the imperious tilt of her head which made her seem almost five-and-a-half. [From John Penquarto A Tale of Literary Life in London

Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself...

I have always had a performers instinct since I was a child.

I had a very difficult relationship with my mother. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night if I wasn't sleeping straight and was messing up the sheets. Now when I stay in hotels I sleep so straight they don't even think I've used the bed.

When I was young you raced from one end of the street to the other, or round the block.

I grew up in Boston.

My understanding of racial discrimination as a child was highly distorted because the most prominent man in Archery was an African-American bishop. When he came home from up north, where he was in charge of A.M.E. churches in five states, it was front-page news. He was the most successful man in my life.

We're all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn't let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn't let us watch 'The Flintstones' if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of 'The Honeymooners'. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old 'Honeymooners'.

I didn't have a fireworks moment for my salvation. I had a falling in love with Jesus in Sunday school when I was a very young child.

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody;

The tragedy with growing up is not that we lose childishness in its simplicity, but that we lose childlikeness in its sublimity.