Toys And Childhood Quotes & Sayings

I am a wordy writer, and often churn out pages on end without advancing the plot a jot. Hence I try to take my cue from a childhood impatience with any device that doesn't get somewhere. Even in his sprightly youth, Clippity had a problem with running in place - just like my first drafts - when the surface was too slick. As a kid, I was ingenious enough to smear green Plasticine on his rear hooves. Thus I discovered the importance of traction, as handy a concept in literature as for wind-up toys. — Lionel Shriver

Father never approved of my toys
Saw them as child's playthings
I was a child

They were my world
I ruled there
And he stepped on them
Destroying them

And in turn
Destroyed me
I should have been left to play
Now I must step on everything — T.P. Louise

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good. — Neil Gaiman

She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, "Does it really belong to me?"
Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back. — Ray Bradbury

Something is going to happen, Laura thought. She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine,innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have a quality of otherness, not only to her confidence, but somehow inside her sealing skin. — Margaret Mahy

I had a happy childhood, with many stimulations and support from my parents who, in postwar times, when it was difficult to buy things, made children's books and toys for us. We had much freedom and were encouraged by our parents to do interesting things. — Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

I do not miss my toys. I wouldn't play with them anyway. I am fifteen. I miss my childhood. — Jo Walton

There were no toys under the bed
that wasn't why he liked it. Why he liked it was that there wasn't anything under the bed
no chickens, no Joey, no Eloise, no sheep, no "no"s. He could lie under the bed and not be told anything at all — Jane Smiley

What I have got from my childhood aren't toys, but memories. And happy memories are better than any toy. — River Phoenix

THE SENTIMENTALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD has produced a great many paradoxes. The most curious, however, may be that children have acquired more and more stuff the more useless they have become. Until the late nineteenth century, when kids were still making vital contributions to the family economy, they didn't have toys as we know them. They played with found and household objects (sticks, pots, brooms). In his book Children at Play, the scholar Howard Chudacoff writes, Some historians even maintain that before the modern era, the most common form of children's play occurred not with toys but with other children - siblings, cousins, and peers. — Jennifer Senior

The reason for this project comes from my childhood, that is clear to me. I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses. — Anselm Kiefer

I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book. — Terry Pratchett

GINGER. He and I established the most wonderful rapport. I think he's infatuated with me; he kept grabbing my ass and telling me how different I am. I think he senses the rebel in me. I've always been in rebellion ever since I was a kid. I remember how whenever my father's tell me to pick my toys up I'd stamp my foot and say "No" twice before picking them up. Oh, I was a mean one. My latest rebellion is my childhood religion; I've just rebelled against that. I used to be High Episcopalian.
BONGI. What're you now?
GINGER. Low Epicsopalian. — Valerie Solanas

(Talking about his first computer) Like all kids we not only fooled around with our toys, we changed them. If you've ever watched a child with a cardboard carton and a box of crayons create a spaceship with cool control panels, or listened to their improvised rules, such as "Red cars can jump all others," then you know that this impulse to make a toy do more is at the heart of innovative childhood play. It is also the essence of creativity. — Bill Gates

At long last I have discovered that most shooters are not interested in firearms as tools, but rather as toys. Such people do not acquire their weapons because of what they will do, but rather to gratify the "Christmas morning joy" that we largely left behind in our childhood. — Jeff Cooper

If you could get anything at all off Santa, what would it be?'
I asked for a fire engine and sweets. Bunty exclaimed in delight, 'Santa will get you that, but you and Scott will need to leave out a bowl of milk and some carrots for Rudolph.'
'Who's Rudolph?' I asked.
Bunty told me in confidence that Rudolph was Santa's reindeer and that he helped pull all the children's toys in the world over the snow. I couldn't wait.
In readiness for Rudolph, Scott, Martha, Bunty and I picked out four of the biggest carrots from a bag in the kitchen, which we then washed. We found a big bowl that we used to lick the cream out of, which we filled with milk. We put the bowl along with the carrots under the Christmas tree, with all the other children's offerings. Then Bunty and Martha came in and washed us, put us to bed and read us a story, before kissing us good night. On their way out they said, 'When you wake up, Santa will have been'. — Stephen Richards

No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer. — Stephen King

You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth. So it is with you and mortal nature. You've given it up. You no longer look "through a glass darkly." But you cannot pass back to the world of human warmth with your new eyes. — Anne Rice

Other than his ex-wife and despite appearances with a series of cultivated blondes, Edward de Bono has never publicly aligned himself with a woman. 'I'm looking for a fat, cross-eyed hunchback,' he explains, stifling a giggle. 'A prosthetic hump would do.' His delight evaporates when asked about his three grandchildren. 'Am I a doting grandfather?' He pauses. 'I'm a ... something grandfather, yes.' The fact that De Bono remains unperturbed by this lack betrays an emotionally austere childhood, and his passions for play, toys, and bad jokes tell of the same deprivation. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. — Steven Pinker

The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedf ellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be. — Richard Dawkins

I didn't have an imaginary childhood friend, but I did one day imagine somehow tiny green men, and they were only tiny and green because my brother had a ton of toy soldier toys that came on a skateboard plank type of thing, and I just envisioned in this car driving to church with my mom, they were there. — Jim Parsons

I loved my childhood. They had the coolest toys back then. Star Wars, Transformers, laser-tag gun sets. Toy companies have really gone downhill. — Jon Heder

Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know that you're avoiding them. — Jodi Picoult

She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten — Stephen King

It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence. — Evelyn Waugh

Over the years our mother has beaten us with belts, shoes, rulers, extension cords, hair brushes, a wooden spoon, a fly swatter, a toilet brush, wire coat hangers, wooden coat hangers and sometimes one of our own toys. When you get whacked by your own paddleball paddle or you have to watch your sister getting spanked with a badminton racquet that she asked Santa Claus (AKA Grandma) to bring, you don't feel much like playing with those things ever again. — Bob Thurber

Because you are not trying simply to complete a set of books or toys or Weetabix cards, you are trying to complete yourself, to get back to the whole person you were before, as a child, before the obstructions and compromises of adulthood got in the way. And yet, all you are really doing is accumulating a pile of crap, souvenirs of the futility of the quest. — Neil Perryman

O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,
Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;
But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys — John Clare

You get to relive your childhood when you have a baby and you see these toys and these books you read when you were little - the innocence that you are able to maintain because you have to find that again in order to connect with your child keeps you in a special state of mind. — Idina Menzel