“The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.” – Mary Shelley Frankenstein, Chapter 24. Victor Frankenstein to Walton.
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. Yet I am one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. – Greta Thunberg At UN climate action summit, New York, 23 September 2019.
The Premier League is not my goal but a childhood dream. It is a dream that could be fulfilled. – Granit Xhaka
People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don’t you feel a certain alienation? – Gunter Grass
My heart goes out to the Lindsay Lohans and Britneys who have really had childhood taken from them and probably missed important developmental steps. They have become sort of ‘public domain’ and something to be made money on. There’s no sense of self there, I’m sure of it. – Genie Francis
From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries. – Harper Lee
My childhood memories seem to be wreathed in the twin and far from harmonious olfactory sensations of patchouli oil and caustic soda. – Hamish Bowles
I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you’re in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you’re in your zone. – Gilbert Hernandez
When we are thirsty, we drink the white waters of the pool, the sweetness of our mournful childhood. – Georg Trakl
My mother was 13 when I was born. My childhood was pretty frantic, to say the least. My mother left when I was about 5, and Daddy started me singing in clubs. Then I started singing on the radio in Oklahoma City when I was 7. – Georgia Holt
I remain very much connected to my childhood… I have never been too jaded or too sophisticated. – Hugh Hefner
Why do we feel jealousy? Therapists often regard the demon as a scar of childhood trauma or a symptom of a psychological problem. And it’s true that people who feel inadequate, insecure, or overly dependent tend to be more jealous than others. – Helen Fisher
I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams. – Halldor Laxness
When I think of my childhood, I see my mother, the complete sixties parent, decked in purple frappe silk caftans, the acidic smell of newly stripped pine mingling with incense. – Hamish Bowles
For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood. – Harriet Ann Jacobs
For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself. – Herman Hesse
My childhood dream was always to be on Broadway. I wanted to end up in TV and film. It’s kind of flipped, and I’m not mad about it, but my childhood dream is Broadway and I want to end up there. – Grant Gustin
Our choosing the right consistently whenever the choice is placed before us creates the solid ground under our faith. It can begin in childhood, since every soul is born with the free gift of the Spirit of Christ. With that Spirit we can know when we have done what is right before God and when we have done wrong in His sight. – Henry B. Eyring
I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction. – Heather O’Neill
Hors d’oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like – and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’oeuvres. – Hector Hugh Munro
I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters. – Giles Foden
My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn’t know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people’s unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me. – Hilary Mantel
My parents didn’t want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood. – Harry Shearer
There’s an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn’t something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don’t toe the line on abstract doctrine you can’t be part of the Church. – Garry Wills
Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me. – Hakeem Olajuwon
