Ellen Hopkins Quotes

I know what I really want for Christmas. I want my childhood back. Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child, of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of or hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded and terribly vulnerable to joy.

Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be.

Everybody's twelve years old in an apple orchard.

With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before

You go back. You search for what made you happy when you were smaller. We are all grown up children, really... So one should go back and search for what was loved and found to be real.

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood!

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.

The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.

Do you hear the children singing?

I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

...and again she wished for Sherwood, and the dappled roof of leaves that never weighed upon her. She pulled her scarf closer around her and thought, I would rather live in a hut in the woods; a hut like the one of my first memories, with a clean-swept dirt floor, and a brown-eyed boy watching me from behind his mother's skirts as I watched him from behind mine.

I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.

Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.

I'd give all the wealth that years have piled, the slow result of life's decay, To be once more a little child for one bright summer day.

I love children because that's a part of my life that was so happy, and I like to remember back to those days where everything is a discovery, and the world is so fresh.

What do you suppose makes all men look back to the time of childhood with so much regret (if their childhood has been, in any moderate degree, healthy or peaceful)? That rich charm, which the least possession had for us, was in consequence of the poorness of our treasures.

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

You can remember times when you were a kid, when life looked too doggoned deliciously beautiful to be left alone. So you could feel like that again if you worked at it.

The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.