John Green Quotes

When you're a kid, you're just not equipped to deal with some of the stuff that life brings you. It's why you have parents. And then, when you don't, there better be somebody who fills in that gap, or you're going to be rudderless for a while.

Everyone underestimates the maturity of kids.

What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life.

I had, probably, a more challenging experience growing up than most middle-class chicks.

I don't know if we ever fully get over the pain of watching a child trying to find their way through a world that too often doesn't understand.

I think it is important for kids to be kids.

I've always felt this, from when I was growing up to now with my son Riley. We don't let them be little. I was not a normal kid, but I had a sense of innocence far longer than we let kids.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

Childhood is a tricky business. Usually, something goes wrong.

When I was a kid, I had to fight for everything.

I don't know if it's that my own childhood felt brief, or I grew up too fast, or I was pushing myself too much at a young age, but I do feel like I am clinging to a certain childlike quality in myself, as a result of a childhood that was sometimes complicated.

The hardest part about being a kid is knowing you have got your whole life ahead of you.

It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.

Those of us who were 12 or 13 when the war started were absolutely thrown into the mainstream. We had to grow up instantly and take care of ourselves.

Growing up in Stockton wasn't all doom and gloom.

I sacrificed a lot of things growing up.

I have seen several hardships since I was a child. As a result, I don't perceive things the way most people do.

I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can't imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.

When you're a kid, you live carefree. You notice things that go on around you, but you live like a kid with no worries until you get to that certain age where trials and tribulations come and you gotta fight and stay on your toes.

I think that everybody in life probably goes through obstacles at different times in life. I wouldn't really call them obstacles, I think that's just called growing up, and I think it's hard to be in the industry at such a young age

I really, really love children and I think probably among children is when I feel mostly berated. It's not like I feel like oh, there's some children here. I have to tone it down. I go nuts with children especially when I ain't got none. So when I'm round my mates' children, I jest them kids up first. I swear at them, I get more worked up, I say crazy stuff to them, fill their heads with nonsense and then I leave them.

When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be.

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. . . Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Pete Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.” They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.