But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
Childhood is a disease — a sickness that you grow out of.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.
Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?
Let a man turn to his own childhood — no further — if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.
The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love.
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.