One's age should be tranquil, as childhood should be playful. Hard work at either extremity of life seems out of place. At midday the sun may burn, and men labor under it; but the morning and evening should be alike calm and cheerful.
Thomas Arnold

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.
Fred Rogers

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.
Tom Holt

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
Beverly Cleary

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
John Le Carre

Right now I belong to the wonderful organization called The Children's Action Network. The first thing we did was immunize 200,000 children across the country against childhood diseases.
Henry Winkler

Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
Alice Miller

She is the first head of government in history to give a whole country its second childhood.
Simon Hoggart

Since an early age I was taught to be very politically aware and knew from childhood that the process was something I wanted to contribute towards if I could.
Adam Rickitt

Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.
Henry Williamson

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
Soren Kierkegaard

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.
Andy Goldsworthy

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
Gaston Bachelard

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.
Dennis Potter

Somewhere in my wildest childhood I must have done something right. Being able to make a boyhood dream come true is one thing, but to have a kid come along and thrill his dad like Brett Hull has thrilled me over his career is too much for one guy to handle.
Bobby Hull

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.
Walter Savage Landor

Sure, my childhood was unusual. All these eccentric, wild people frequented our home: rock stars, drag queens, models, bikers, freaks. But I was not this little rich girl. My mom and I lived in an apartment.
Liv Tyler

That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.
Adam Savage

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Virginia Woolf