I always had all of these childhood fantasies about wanting to invent things, like a spaceship or a time machine. And everyone’s imagined what it would be like to go back in time and change things, to see what would happen if you had a different life. ‘Back to the Future’ fulfills all of those daydreams. It’s the perfect movie.

I must have been 12 years old. I remember it was raining. We passed by the National Gallery, and that wonderful pink marble, in the rain it gets a very rich rose. I remember looking up and saying to my parents, ‘That’s the kind of job I would like to have some day.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens. Superabundant existence wells in my heart.

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?

When I was a little kid, I simply loved music and enjoyed expressing myself with my body.

I remember being captivated by Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ when I read it as a kid.

When I was a little boy, my wish was to be on an airplane. My wish was to get on a plane and fly to the sky.

Chum was a British boy’s weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book; and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

I’ve always loved music since I was a little kid.

Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.

Back to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.

My favorite of my books is DAVE AT NIGHT, because it’s loosely based on my father’s childhood in an orphanage.

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you

I want something mouthwatering and tasty which reminds me of childhood. The scent of a fairground, candy floss, little cakes, chocolates and caramels. Perfume must not be linked just to fashion because that means that one day it will go out of style

It is a childhood dream to be in the World Cup

When kids my age were picking up toy cars, I used to buy toy guns.

PSG is the team I’ve always supported, since I was little.

It was a passion from my childhood to work for children, I carried it forward. I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labour. It perpetuates poverty. If children are deprived of education, they remain poor.

You have given the great honour … to hundreds of millions of children in the world who are deprived of their childhood and health and education, and fundamental right to freedom. It is a great moment for all those children.

I was personally concerned and involved in child rights-related activities right from my childhood.

Denial of childhood and denial of freedom are the biggest sins which humankind has been committing and perpetuating for ages.

Every single minute matters, every single child matters, every single childhood matters.

Childhood means simplicity. Look at the world with the child’s eye – it is very beautiful.

She told me that she would support me regardless of what I decided, but I’m so glad that I actually got to be a kid before having to grow up. My mom knows best about this kind of thing.

I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv.

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven’t in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there.

The Gap has always been an iconic, go-to brand that reminds me of my childhood

My dad used to turn of the TV an scold me to study.

While growing up, I used to go to the beach, as I used to find peace there.

The dream of every kid is to play for the country, and I am no different.

He had total love in his eyes when he performed. He was the total androgenous beauty. I would practice Elvis in front of the mirror when I was twelve or thirteen years old.

I think I was 9, and my mom ordered them for me from a catalogue. They bred like crazy, and I was selling gerbils all around Michigan. They wrote a story about me in the local newspaper.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

I was always in the popular crowd, but I really had atrocious teeth. I was encouraged to ‘do well in school, ’cause no one’s going to marry you!

You might say that Richard Wagner was the Queen Victoria of Europe. He had musical children everywhere.

So much of what holds us back in life are the long-held resentments stemming from childhood.

It is no use to preach to children if you do not act decently yourself.

Poetry simply exists within me, and on my lap; it is the thirst of a submerged childhood. Although the result is bitter and hard, the poetry I make cleanses me of the world’s dust and even the inscrutable, essential vileness similar to what we call original sin.

I have all that I lost and I go carrying my childhood like a favorite flower that perfumes my hand.

When I was a kid I did impressions and funny voices a lot. When I was telling a story I would use the voices to make it more entertaining.

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded…I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed…I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

There is one front and one battle where everyone in the United States-every man, woman, and child is in action and will be privileged to remain in action throughout this war. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives, and in our daily tasks.

I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we’d vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.

My mom used to tell me when I was little, ‘When it rains, it’s God’s manifestation — a big day’s waiting to happen.’

I think of myself as constantly realizing a childhood dream.

Postal officials say that before Christmas they receive tons of letters written to Santa Claus, but after Christmas how few letters of thanks are sent to him! From childhood onward, human beings seem to be characterized by thanklessness.

I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs – The name They dropped opon my face With water, in the country church Is finished using, now, And They can put it with my Dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools, I’ve finished threading – too

Oneness with Nature is the glory of childhood; oneness with childhood is the glory of the Teacher.

Childhood decisions do not have to define you.

I was slicking my hair back when I was in sixth grade.

People think, ‘Well, religion is good for mankind. It must be worth teaching it to children.’ Well, you have to look at the texts. You have to say, ‘Do I, as a parent, if I can avoid it, want my child to be taught this?’

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world?

My childhood favourite is mum’s shepherd’s pie, Yorkshire pudding and roasted potatoes. I remember coming home from school and going to the kitchen to help her. It’s because of her that I discovered my love for cooking.

We didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a very hard upbringing with very limited food on the table. We never sat down to a starter, main course and pudding and we had to eat everything we were given. There was no such thing as ‘don’t like’ in our family.

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.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

My kitchen looks like the one from my childhood – very homey, with a little bit of Alice in Wonderland!

If I carefully consider others, God will consider me, and in some way or other He will recompense me. Let me consider the poor, and the LORD will consider me. Let me look after little children, and the LORD will treat me as His child. Let me feed His flock, and He will feed me. Let me water His garden, and He will make a watered garden of my soul. This is the LORD’s own promise; be it mine to fulfill the condition and then to expect its fulfillment.

For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk

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

Before you judge me , try hard to love me , look within your heart Then ask , – have you seen my childhood ?

All of us are products of our childhood.

Eventually, I started writing down a bunch of titles that related to childhood themes and would pair it with an adult situation that either I was going through or someone else in my life was going through.

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?

My childhood was full of deep sorrows – colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

Childhood has no forebodings, but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?

The greatest moment of my life was when I was eight years old and asked my mother what the capital of Uruguay was. She didn’t know, but she took me to the library where I found out it was Montevideo. It was like a huge light went on in my head. That was it.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

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.

When I was a kid, if a guy got killed in a western movie I always wondered who got his horse.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children

If you don’t heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future.

I had a nice childhood. War and all the experiences affected me as a person and helped me to grow, to change

Obviously, from childhood to my teenage years, I really came into my own. I left the house early; I was on the streets when I was, like, 15. I’ve been holdin’ my own since that age

Bone Thugs is one of my favorite rap groups of all time. I listened to them all the time when I was a kid.

I grew up without a father, so I have to be on point for my kids.

Second to my children, spending time with refugees and other persons of need around the world has been the greatest gift, … It’s been the greatest life lesson I could ever receive.

Ever since I was a kid, I was always the winner.

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, ‘Don’t get comfortable, because we may not be here long.

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

I got attention by being funny at school, pretending to be retarded, and jumping around with a deformed hand.

I don’t deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn’t because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.

Know, Nature’s children all divide her care; The fur that warms a monarch, warmed a bear

Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart therefrom

As a little kid growing up in Hollywood, I was called ‘a little crazy’. And now I guess I’m still that way.

I went to a concert once when I was a little kid and ran up onstage, started dancing, started saying anything that came to my head. I was like a little vaudevillian.

We are all shaped from memories we have as young people.

I saw all the moral decay you could, beginning at 2 years old. But I also got to see how the other half lived.

I’ve never done drugs. That’s because I saw this stuff literally every day when I was 3 or 4 years old.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Mom would say, ‘Get out of the house,’ and we would just go. We had all sorts of large swings and flying foxes and various death traps throughout the forest that we’d try and do our best to hurt ourselves on. It was a great childhood in terms of being creative, I think.

Almost every person, from childhood, has been touched by the untamed beauty of wildflowers.

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.

I was gonna rip his heart out. I’m the best ever. I’m the most brutal and vicious, the most ruthless champion there has ever been. No one can stop me. Lennox is a conqueror? No! He’s no Alexander! I’m Alexander! I’m the best ever. I’m Sonny Liston. I’m Jack Dempsey. There’s never been anyone like me. I’m from their cloth. There is no one who can match me. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I’m the ferocious. I want his heart! I want to eat his children! Praise be to Allah!

This is much more than I dreamed about as a boy. I want to thank football in general for what it has given me.

I don’t know, I’ve liked football since I was a kid and I’ve always dreamt of becoming a professional footballer, I never thought of any other job.

Football has been my life since I was a kid. My style remains the same, I love every single minute I get on the pitch. I know I have a great responsibility, and that there are objectives to accomplish, but I try to have fun too, because that’s what i love to do.

When I was a kid, my friends would call me to go out with them, but I would stay home because I had practice the next day.

I had a nice childhood, even though I grew up in hotels.

My childhood years were very painful. I was only 5 when the Croatian War of Independence broke out. I was living in a war zone and lost my grandfather in that war.

When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.

I had a lot of racism growing up where I grew up. Bullied at school. It definitely encouraged me. It’s like battle wounds – you come out the other side, and it just makes you tougher.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

I always want to be the best at what I do. As a kid, whatever I was doing, if I was playing football or whatever I was applying my energy to at the time, I always wanted to do it to the best of my abilities. And I was always interested in finding out how I could do it better.

I grew up listening to everybody.

I know how important it is to have a helping hand. In my childhood, I had difficult times because of hormonal problems. If I hadn’t had support, I wouldn’t have been able to fulfil my dreams.