Russell Baker Quotes

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

I think it's more difficult writing what it's like to be a child. You can pretend you know what it's like, but you don't really know. The only parts I can remember is that the adults were like, "Aren't they cute?" But when you're little you're looking at the other kids like they're your colleagues. They're not like, "Oh, we're all cute little kids." They're more like your office acquaintances. It's very hard to grasp the memories of what it actually was like to be a kid.

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

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

I took the stairs and felt like my childhood took the elevator.

I have a lot of stories about being a kid because it was the last time I was interesting.

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.

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.

If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.

Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

It has that thing - the imagination, and the feeling of happy excitement- I knew when I was a kid.

The idea for me is that if the movie connects with you the way I want it to connect with you, you should be experiencing both the horror and the wonder as a child would. From a child's point of view. When we're kids, brutality registers differently than when we are adults. Because as adults, we get too used to violence.

There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, to look back to when we were children.

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

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

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

The gruel that children's little hands have stirredIs sweeter than nectar.

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.

People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.