Wallace Stegner Quotes

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.

You should really try to live your childhood when you’re a child, because if you do it when you’re 26, it can be dangerous.

The roots of a child's ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child's having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return. If a child finds this during the first years of life, he or she can grow up to be a competent, healthy person.

Nature only goes so far. Nurture, what you raised on and what you ingest as a youngster, it really affects you when you grow up in really subtle, long drawn-out ways. And to find that, to hear that thing again all those years later and to realize that was the source, it's like, "What else has me twisted?" So now I'm going back to robots and cartoons; I go back to all this to see what got me the way that I am.

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.

I trembled to think of a world without stars. No guide for the sailor to trust at see, no jewels to dazzle our sense of beauty [...] But all around the globe, the air is so dirty and the lights from the cities are so bright that for some people few stars can be seen anymore. A generation of children may grow up seeing a blank sky and asking, "Did there used to be stars there?

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.

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.

It would be very sad if children had no memories before those of school. What they need most is the love and attention of their mother.

For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.

If you grow up in a home where actions don't lead to predictable consequences, you don't develop strategies to control your impulses.

There are some things children cannot know, because once they learn them they are no longer children.

Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.

Children are the most learning-hungry beings in the world.

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?

If you take a child from South Africa and you put them in Boston, they're going to speak with a Boston accent. And so, that's a way to see the world as everybody is equal, not as a result of politics, but as human beings.

We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.

The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.