Childhood: Quotations (M-Z)


Figure 1.--Many families in the 1930s and 40s had chalk and pastel drawings done of their children. This one was done in 1933. The boy and artist are unidentified.

HBC readers will find a wide rang of interesting quotations here. Some famous quotations about boys provide some fascinating insights into boys and childhood over the years. We will list some of our favorite quotations. We will include quotations by boys as well as adult quotations about boys. We will also include quotes from famous people about their boyhood or quotes by other about the boyhood of famous people. Do let us know if you have a favorite quotation. We will archive them by author. Most of our quotations are american or British, primarily because of our familarity with English-language literature and history. Hopefully our readers will provide some pertinent quottions from their country to include here.

MacLeish, Archibald

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard--by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.

Lorde, Audre (U,S., 1934- )

I am fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret

(de) Madariaga Salvador (1886-1978)

Do you never feel a desire to work? I asked a lazy boy. I do Sir, he answered, but I never give in to it.

Mann, Thomas (1875-1955)

With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period. [HBC note: An excert from Death in Venice.]

Maugham, W. Somerset (England, 1874-1966)

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.

Melville, Herman (U.S., 1819-91)

Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent any thing but happiness.

Miller, Henry (U.S., 1891-1980)

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.

Missing Sewell, Elizabeth (England, 1815-1906)

A boy’s mind is not so easily sullied as a girl’s .... Undesirable knowledge is not an equal shock to the moral nature.

Milne, A.A. (England, 1924)

Little Boy kneels at the foot of the bed
Droops on the little hands, little gold head;
Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

Morgan, Huw (Wales)

Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father. And I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind, as if I had heard them only yesterday. [HBC note: Philip Dunne and John Ford. Voiceover narration of Huw Morgan (played by Roddy McDowall) as an adult from the movie "How Green Was My Valley" (1941). The movie was based on a novel by Richard Llewellyn.]

Mother Goose (17th-18th century)

Little Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn,

Newton, Sir Issac (England, 1642-1727)

I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Pittman, Frank (U.S., 1993)

Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how to be men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.

Plato (Greece, c427-347 BC)

Of all animals the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated.

Pleasants, Henry (U.S., 19??)

One small town boy, born at the right time, in the right place, in the right environment and under the right circumstances [represented the convergence] of all the musical currents of America’s subculture: black and white gospel, country and western and rhythm and blues. [HBC note: Referring to Elvis Presley.]

Rooney, Mickey (U.S.)

I was a 14-year-old boy for 30 years.

Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1882-1945)

General de Gaulle was a thoroughly bad boy. The day he arrived, he thought he was Joan of Arc and the following day he insisted that he was Georges Clemenceau. [HBC note: Roosevelt like Churchill throughly disliked de Gaulle, but the French people idolized him.]

Roth, Philip (1933- )

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

Ruskin, John (England, 1819-1900)

You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.

Scott, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Just at the age ’twixt boy and youth,
When thought is speech, and speech is truth.

Shakespare, William/Richard (1564-1616)

O, ‘tis a parlous boy,
Bold, quick, ingenious, forward, capable.
He is all the mother’s, from the top to toe.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (England, 1792-1822)

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

St. John, George C. (U.S.)

We save a boy’s soul at the same time we are saving his algebra.

Scott, Robert Falcon (1868-1912)

Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games.

Shakespear, William (England, 1564-1616)

The boy was the very staff of my age, my very prop.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

We were, fair queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,>br> And to be boy eternal.

Sherman, William Tecumseh (United States, 1820-91)

There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1983)

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

Stevenson, Adlai (U.S., 1900-65)

In America any boy may become President, and I suppose it’s just one of the risks he takes!

It reminds me of the small boy who jumbled his biblical quotations and said: "A lie is an abomination unto the Lord, and a very present help in trouble."

Stokowski, Leopold (1967)

As a boy I remember how terribly real the statues of the saints would seem at 7 o’clock Mass--before I’d had breakfast. From that I learned always to conduct hungry.

Tate, Allen Tate (U.S., 1899-1979)

My darling boy whom I shall never know,
My son, I love you in my deepest fears....

Thomas, Dylan (1914-1953)

Years and years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlours, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

Twain, Mark (1835-1910)

There’s plenty of boys that will come hankering and grovelling around you when you’ve got an apple, and beg the core off of you; but when they’ve got one, and you beg for the core and remind them how you give them a core one time, they say thank you ’most to death, but there ain’t-a-going to be no core.

Westlake, Donald (U.S., 1993- )

Who’s a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?

Twain, Mark (U.S., 1835-1910)

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

There’s plenty of boys that will come hankering and grovelling around you when you’ve got an apple, and beg the core off of you; but when they’ve got one, and you beg for the core and remind them how you give them a core one time, they say thank you ’most to death, but there ain’t-a-going to be no core.

Wells, H. G. (1866-1946)

"There suddenly appeared in my world a new sort of boy-a most agreeable development of the slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking town-bred youngster-a boy in khaki hat and bare knees and athletic bearing earnestly engaged in wholesome and invigorating games-the Boy Scout. I like the Boy Scout." The New Machiavellie.

Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807-92)

Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!

Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,
Ere it passes, barefoot boy!

Willans, Geoffrey

The only good things about skool are the BOYS wizz who are noble brave fearless etc. although you hav various swots, bulies, cissies, milksops, greedy guts and oiks with whom i am forced to mingle hem-hem. Down With Skool! (1953) p. 7

Williams, Ted (U.S., 192?-2002)

Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. Ted Williams.

Woolf, Virginia (England, 1882-1941)

You send a boy to school in order to make friends--the right sort.







HBC





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Created: July 14, 2002
Last updated: August 31, 2002