If you can't hold children in your arms, please hold them in your hearts.

The illusions of childhood are necessary experiences: a child should not be denied a balloon just because an adult knows that sooner or later it will burst.

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for fourteen-year-olds now to establish friendships with twenty-six-year-olds - because they know by the age of fourteen all they are ever going to know.

The greatest lessons in life, if we would but stoop and humble ourselves, we would learn not from the grown-up learned men, but from the so-called ignorant children.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

I suppose we all tend to remember only the happiness from our childhood, as a sundial refuses to tell the time except in fine weather.

Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.

As for childhood being carefree, I know from my own experience that black care can sit behind us even on our rocking-horses.

The dominant expression of a child is gravity.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected to it to hell.