"[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are."
— Jim Henson (It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider)

"Gym should be illegal. It's humiliating."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"It's not about how to achieve your dreams, it's about how to lead your life, ... If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, the dreams will come to you."
— Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)

"My parents are going to kill me!"
"That seems rather harsh..."
— Garth Nix (Sir Thursday)

"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us."
— Tom Stoppard (The Coast of Utopia)

"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

"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

"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose."
— P.G. Wodehouse

""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 Frey

"Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-see Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God."
— Scott Dikkers (You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day)

"As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know."
— Carl Gustav Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

"Would it be possible for me to see something from up there?" asked Milo politely.

"You could," said Alec, "but only if you try very hard to look at things as an adult does."

Milo tried as hard as he could, and, as he did, his feet floated slowly off the ground until he was standing in the air next to Alex Bings. He looked around very quickly and, an instant later, crashed back down to the earth again.

"Interesting, wasn't it?" asked Alex.

"Yes, it was," agreed Milo, rubbing his head and dusting himself off, "but I think I'll continue to see things as a child. It's not so far to fall."
— Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth)

"Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual."
— Alfred Hitchcock

"Art is a process, not a product."
— MaryAnn F. Kohl

"The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics."
— Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)

"Puff, the Magic Dragon, lived by the sea, and frolicked in the Autumn Mist in a land called Honah Lee, little Jacky Paper loved that rascal Puff, and gave him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff."
— Peter Yarrow (Puff the Magic Dragon Book & CD)

"The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites."
— Katherine Dunn

"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 (Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel)

"People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public."
— Bryan White

"Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"An idyllic childhood is probably illusion."
— Martha Grimes (The Lamorna Wink)

". . . 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

"What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"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

"I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it."
— Harry S. Truman

"Many people know Golda Meir's famous line, 'If not now, when?' Little do they know, she actually learned this when she was five.
Little Golda: 'I have to pee.'
Golda's mother: 'Not now, sweetie.'
Little Golda: 'If not now, when?'"
— Dana Rosen

"...Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

"There is no land like the land of your childhood."
— Michael Powell

"When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it."
— Gregory Maguire (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister)

"Each month is gay,
Each season nice,
When eating
Chicken soup
With rice"
— Maurice Sendak (Chicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months)

"The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous"
— John le Carré

"...the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy."
— Harold Brodkey

"Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood"
— Rudyard Kipling

"His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]"
— Heather O'Neill

"If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's."
— Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens)

"Because the golden egg gleamed
in my basket once, though my childhood
became an immense sheet of darkening water
I was Noah, and I was his ark,
and there were two of every animal inside me"
— Mark Doty

"Her own dolls were either babies or storybook characters like Cinderella and Snow White who though past childhood were somehow not yet into the world, girls who kept themselves apart from the world without really knowing what for. Now girls know what for. They menstruate when they are ten, and their dolls are sluts."
— Josephine Humphreys (Dreams of Sleep)

"Thought you could kill my Snow-on-the-Mountain, did you? Well, Jessie says that the top's growing back out. Next time you'll know how to do it right, won't you? You'll pull it up by the roots, won't you?"
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"He was a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. When we played, his child's heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed and mothers and fathers were dim and far away--too far away to ever reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal--would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard."
— Harold Brodkey