Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
~ Ambrose Bierce

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
~ Louise Bogan

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
~ Deepak Chopra

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.
~ Leonard Cohen

What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love.
~ Meister Eckhart

Childhood is a disease -- a sickness that you grow out of.
~ William Golding

Let a man turn to his own childhood -- no further -- if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
~ Alice Meynell

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.
~ John Milton

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.
~ Pablo Picasso

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
~ Marcel Proust

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.
~ Howard Pyle

Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
~ William M. Thackeray

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?
~ Thomas Traherne

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.
~ Thornton Wilder

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
~ Virginia Woolf

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
~ William Wordsworth