Childhood Dream Quotes & Sayings

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood. — Sigmund Freud

Don't wait, make it happen. Take action to be great. My motto is 'Don't wait for others to say yes. You can say yes'.

I live it everyday because of my past experiences in my studies not leading to a job in the field that we all hope for and imagine while we study. After years of frustration and struggle, I decided to make my own luck and returned to my childhood dream of being an author.

Because of my own belief in my self, my own struggles and determination, I am currently the author of 2 books. All in the space of less than 12 months. So when you want to achieve something, tell yourself that 'I say yes and my yes is the only one that counts. — Tia Mitsis

I am closer and closer to reaching my childhood dream. This is really exciting! I will continue to work hard, to focus on each tournament I play. — Yani Tseng

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers. — Gaston Bachelard

It's a thrill to fulfill your own childhood dreams, but as you get older, you may find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun. — Randy Pausch

Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination. — Naomi Wolf

But even as she calls adult reality unreal, Alice, as the most reasonable creature in her unreasonable dreams, doesn't quite yet realize that the adult's sense of reality has already taken up residence in her. The principal dream of most children - the dream within the dream, as it were - is the dream of not dreaming any longer, the dream of growing up. For the adult, the outlook is reversed. The adult's quest is an inverted one: to find those desires again, in more reasonable forms - and this involves forgetting the original childhood desires (to become an adult) in order to remember them as an adult — Tan Lin

Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on
our lost narcissism lives on
in our ego ideal. — Judith Viorst

My parents used to rent old movies - my whole childhood is in black and white - and it was my dream to make films. — Tom Rachman

("Anyone who uses 'childhood' and 'dream' in the same sentence usually gets my attention. — Christopher Hitchens

You know, a daydream properly utilized can be the most powerful force in the universe. One need only dream of freedom to begin to break the spell of enslavement. — William Joyce

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament ... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy. — Bernard Berenson

Kids never jumped head first from the top ledge. Never. It seemed forever before
Stoney came back to the surface. Most of the white bubbles had already disappeared. — Cole Alpaugh

Your childhood dream delights God. I don't say that because every secret dream will come true. But having a dream is evidence of a person who is fully alive. Having a dream is a reflection of the image of God. — Emily P. Freeman

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes. — Gaston Bachelard

It's very, very special for me. This is where I've grown up, it's my home, and winning the Monaco Grand Prix is the highlight of any racing driver's career and for me a childhood dream. It being my home makes it all the more special, unbelievable. — Nico Rosberg

Messi, he's exceptional. When you watch him, you feel there's a child inside him and he is making some childhood dream come true. He's a Great Player, not only for today but also tomorrow. — Eric Cantona

MY MOST CONSTANT and vivid memory is not so much of the people but of the actual house in Aracataca where I lived with my grandparents. It's a recurring dream which persists even now. What's more, every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I've dreamed I'm in that huge old house. Not that I've gone back there but that I am there, at no particular age, for no particular reason - as if I'd never left it. Even now in my dreams that sense of night-time foreboding which dominated my whole childhood still persists. It was an uncontrollable sensation which began early every evening and gnawed away at me in my sleep until I saw dawn breaking through the cracks in the door. — Gerald Martin

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming. — Joyce Carol Oates

I have dual citizenship; it just so happens I live in America. I would like to go back to Wales. I'm obsessed with my childhood, and at least three times a week dream I am back there. — Anthony Hopkins

Some people take the spelling bee very seriously. These people are called "parents of children in the spelling bee." They're trying to make up for their own childhood of crushed dreams and misspelled words. — Craig Ferguson

My childhood memories reside somewhere in my subconscious part of my brain. Somehow I feel that my subconscious part creates far more interesting things than my conscious part can ever dream of. — Akram Khan

I remember how beautiful the Merrimac looked to me in childhood, the first true river I ever knew; it opened upon my sight and wound its way through my heart like a dream realized; its harebells, its rocks, and its rapids, are far more fixed in my memory than anything about the sea. — Lucy Larcom

For almost thirty years I repeatedly saw one and the same dream: I would arrive in Vienna at long last. I would feel really happy, for I was returning to my serene childhood. — Alfred Schnittke

As long as I'm dealing in honesty, I may as well admit that I have been more influenced (as a person) by my childhood readings of Tolkien and Lewis than I have been by any philosophers I read in college and grad school. The events and characters in Narnia and Middle Earth shaped my ideals, my dreams, my goals. Kant just annoyed me. — N.D. Wilson

Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream
of becoming an artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete
lives the rest of their life with a sense of loss, with nagging what ifs, — Glenn Kurtz

Ambition was the old dream of his youth and childhood, a dream which he did not confess even to himself, though it was so strong that now his passion was even doing battle with his love — Leo Tolstoy

I'm first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can't say why I'm one. — Paulo Coelho

I would dream of birds and flora, beasts and cave dwellers. Every childhood night was a broken night. My sister escaped. For a while, my brother did too (extraordinarily). — Abigail George

Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams! — Thomas Carlyle

For a long time, I missed being in the courtroom every day. I missed trial work. It was so much a part of my life. It was what I did and who I was. But over the years I did find the opportunity to realize my childhood dream of writing crime fiction. — Marcia Clark

And he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears - a mythology
he cannot inherit. — Allen Ginsberg

We all have a childhood dream that when there is love, everything goes like silk, but the reality is that marriage requires a lot of compromise. — Raquel Welch

If I could perform on stage with any musical act or performer, it would be Sugar Ray, just to fulfill my childhood dream of singing with Mark McGrath. — Chelsea Kane

To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream ...
... if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it. — Jean Cocteau

Remember brick walls let us show our dedication. They are there to separate us from the people who don't really want to achieve their childhood dreams. — Randy Pausch

As the seasons age us
I close my eyes and wish for snow
Alas the Irish seasons been foretold
For Spring will dawn and I will go
Into another season Jack Frost cold.
And when its here, I wish for night
As childhood memories flash right by
To see the birds in humble flight
I wish for Summer with a sigh
And on I go to months so sweet
Dawns sweet chorus and sunbeams bright
I yearn for Autumn leaves under feet
Yet now I dream of Winters night
As Auld Lang Syne rings in New Year
Alas! I'm one year older as Spring draws near. — Michelle Geaney

My childhood dream was to play basketball, actually. — Godfrey Gao

When I was seven, I gave a letter to Cinderella in Disney World asking if I could be in a Disney movie. So, working for Disney was really a childhood dream come true. — Brittany Curran

Childhood hunger in America is as much a paradox as it is a tragedy. Why, in the wealthiest country in the world, should hunger darken the lives and dreams of 12 million children and their families? I believe that, when Americans learn the facts and understand how their involvement can make a difference, banishing childhood hunger will be a national, local and personal priority. — Martin Sheen

It took Emily a long time to realize that Sarah was dead. Sometimes, waking from a dream of childhood filled with Sarah's face and Sarah's voice, she would go and study her own face in the bright bathroom mirror until she found assurance that it was still the face of Sarah's sister, and that it didn't look old. — Richard Yates

As she won fame playing Ethel Mertz, she perceived all of her theater work not as an end in itself, let alone the fulfillment of a childhood dream, but solely as preparation for I Love Lucy. She never really could savor the fact that, while no Broadway legend, she had become a respected and regularly employed working actress. — Rob Edelman

Becoming an economist was not a childhood dream of mine. — Harry Markowitz

Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can't be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and the skills to get what we want within the limitations imposed by reality - a reality which consists of diminished powers, restricted freedoms and, with the people we love, imperfect connections. — Judith Viorst

I really can't complain about anything. I'm living a childhood dream and I have a perfect family. There's really nothing that I'm disappointed with. — Tim Hudson

If you grow up ... in the suburbs of anywhere, a dream like this seems kind of vaguely ludicrous and completely unattainable, this moment is directly connected to those childhood imaginings. And for anybody who's on the downside of advantage, and relying purely on courage, it's possible. — Russell Crowe

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. — Jack Kerouac

I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that. — Anthony Bourdain

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. — Lewis Carroll

I have changed refuge so often, in the course of my rout, that now I can't tell between dens and ruins. But there was never any city but the one. It is true you often move along in a dream, houses and factories darken the air, trams go by and under your feet wet from the grass there are suddenly cobbles. I only know the city of my childhood, I must have seen the other, but unbelieving. All I say cancels out, I'll have said nothing. — Samuel Beckett

The Rocky Mountains realize - nay, exceed - the dream of my childhood. It is magnificent, and the air is life-giving. — Isabella Bird

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's. — Johan Huizinga

For most of us, dreams come true only after they do not matter, Only in childhood do we ever have the chance of making dreams come true when they mean everything. — Lois Wyse

It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don't ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is 'your goddam mother' or something else entirely). — Gilles Deleuze

At this point I thought 'We made it,' by which I meant 'We survived.' I also was acutely aware that my childhood dream of flying into space had just come true. — Ron Garan

A Dream of Undying Fame is a probing, elegant and balanced book. Louis Breger shows how Freud's traumatic childhood shaped his ambitious, detached and authoritarian personality, and led to the betrayal of his mentor, Josef Breuer. Breger's analysis exposes a fascinating paradox: Freud both invented psychoanalysis and impoverished its development. A must-read for everyone interested in how ideas can change the world. — Brenda Webster

When you have a childhood dream that still burns and tugs at your heart when you're an adult, you owe it to yourself to pursue and achieve this dream. — Robert Cheeke

There are four obstacles.
First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is impossible.
The second obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream.
The third obstacle: fear of the defeats we will meet on the path.
The fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives. — Paulo Coelho

After he got back to his apartment that evening, Arthur remembered how completely he'd thought he'd solved the problem of his own childhood once he'd claimed Lillian and enveloped her in his dream
no one idle, no one beset by solitude, everyone laughing. The problem he had not solved, or even known existed, was how quickly it passed, every joke, every embrace, every babyhood and childhood, every moment of thinking that he had things figured out for good. — Jane Smiley

Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca. — Patti Smith

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.
It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched. — Audre Lorde

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed. — Jack London

Butterflies add another dimension to the garden, for they are like dream flowers - childhood dreams - which have broken loose from their stalks and escaped into the sunshine. — Miriam Rothschild

My childhood dream was to win the Olympics, and I've done that. Everything else is icing on the cake. — Lindsey Vonn

Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn't sure how to start. — John Grisham

I had the pleasure, as Robin said, to live a childhood dream as many young Americans and Puerto Rican children live that play youth baseball. And I feel honored and very thankful for that opportunity. — Nolan Ryan

I know full well what it means to dream. My whole childhood, I begged for a bicycle, and I never did get one. — Svetlana Alexievich

It has long been a childhood dream of mine to have a farm. — Jasmine Guinness

But still I dream that somewhere there must be
The spirit of a child that waits for me. — Bayard Taylor

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express. — Mavis Gallant

I had a really intense flying dream most of my childhood into my teens. I would go out at night and fly all over the city and I could facilitate other people to fly with me. — Dee Dee Ramone

It's not about how to achieve your dreams, it's about how to lead your life, ... If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, the dreams will come to you. — Randy Pausch

You must have had such a great childhood with a man like that for your father. (Delphine)
Yeah. All puppy dogs and rainbows and those weird furry people with padded coat hangers on their heads that look like space aliens on acid. (Jericho)
You mean the Teletubbies? (Berith)
The fact that you know what they're called, Berith, truly scares me. (Jericho)
As a demon of torture, it behooves me to know all things that are deeply annoying. You'd be amazed how many people in the modern age no longer fear zombies as much as Teletubbies. (Berith)
Not really. I'd rather battle a brain-eating zombie any day than hear them sing. (Jericho) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms. — Gaston Bachelard

Due to the NFL lockout, I'm excited to be able to follow my childhood dream of playing for a Major League Soccer team. — Chad Ochocinco

We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected. — Ben Okri

While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. — Charles Lamb

CHILDHOOD I That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, nobler than Mexican and Flemish fables; his domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celt. At the border of the forest - dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare, - the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields, nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea; baby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens, - young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage, little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. What boredom, the hour of the "dear body" and "dear heart." II — Arthur Rimbaud

My childhood dream was to study mechanical engineering. After reading 'The Mysterious Island' - which I read 25 times as a boy - I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that. — Dan Shechtman

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify by their own lonesome familiarities to this feeling. Ecstasy, even , I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. — Jack Kerouac

It's always been a dream of mine, and a childhood fantasy, to play a great champion. I would much rather haven been an athlete than an actor. This is like some second place consolation prize. — Mark Wahlberg

The new album is a childhood dream come true. Got to sing with Ronnie Spector, got to cover a bunch of songs that were influential in drawing a line between the punk form and original rock and roll. — Jerry Only

She wished, as almost all kids wish at one point or another, that she could turn into a pterodactyl and fly away and never come back. — Gina Damico

If you're going to have childhood dreams you should have great parents who let you pursue them and express your creativity — Randy Pausch

I think it shapes it in very deep ways that you don't entirely understand. Rainer Maria Rilke said there are two inexhaustible sources for poetry. One is dreams, and the other is childhood. I think childhood is an inexhaustible source of your becoming who you will be and certain deep feelings are set inside of you. — Edward Hirsch

Rain
Soft rain, summer rain
Whispers from bushes, whispers from trees.
Oh, how lovely and full of blessing
To dream and be satisfied.
I was so long in the outer brightness,
I am not used to this upheaval:
Being at home in my own soul,
Never to be led elsewhere.
I want nothing, I long for nothing,
I hum gently the sounds of childhood,
And I reach home astounded
In the warm beauty of dreams.
Heart, how torn you are,
How blessed to plow down blindly,
To think nothing, to know nothing,
Only to breathe, only to feel. — Hermann Hesse

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses. — Rebecca McNutt

They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. "What on earth will you be doing with something so large?" said Mum.
"I shall live in it with my servants, of course," said Mina. "Or I shall establish a school."
"A school, my lady?"
"Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities. — David Almond

It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we wanted wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. Life would be one long party.
Yes, that had been the dream. — John Marsden

My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero. — Orhan Pamuk

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

I had always wanted to be on SNL, it's not always great, but it's this leftover childhood dream. — Rachel Dratch

Hillary Clinton said that her childhood dream was to be an Olympic athlete. But she was not athletic enough. She said she wanted to be an astronaut, but at the time they didn't take women. She said she wanted to go into medicine, but hospitals made her woozy. Should she be telling people this story? I mean she's basically saying she wants to be president because she can't do anything else. — Jay Leno

Everyone lives through this difficult period. For the average person it's the point in his life when the demands of his own life clash most violently with the world around him, when his forward path must be fought for most bitterly. Many experience this death and rebirth, which are our destiny, only this once in their life, when childhood decays and slowly disintegrates, when all that has become dear to us is about to leave us and we suddenly feel the solitude and deathly chill of outer space around us. And very many are hung up for good on this reef and for the rest of their life cling painfully to the irretrievable past, to the dream of the lost paradise, which is the worst and most murderous of all dreams. — Hermann Hesse

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

This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older. — Anna Quindlen

Only In Sleep
Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.
Only in sleep Time is forgotten
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.
The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child? — Sara Teasdale

The things that I write are autobiographical in a surreal sense, like when you have a dream and you go to the doctor's office, but then you turn around and it's actually your childhood home and the doctor has turned into Ryan Reynolds. — Diablo Cody

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer. — Stephen King

I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream. — Andrew Wiles