Quotes About Boyhood

“He remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had - a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.”

— Bernard Malamud

“In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.”

— Robert Bly

“My Heart May Change Over Time (Boyhood->Manhood->Old) But The Love It Carries, Will Remain The Same ...”

— Muhammad Imran Hasan

“No. No, first comes boyhood. You get to play with soldiers and spacemen, cowboys and ninjas, pirates and robots. But before you know it, all that comes to an end. And then, Remo Williams, is when the adventure begins.”

— Brian K. Vaughan

“There was a saying that the strength of a man's steel was only known under the hammer of circumstance. If anyone had asked me a few hours ago, I would have said that nearly five years of boyhood had hammered me into constant fear and excessive caution. But now I realised it had done the opposite. It had shaped me into someone who stepped forwards and reached for what she wanted. It was too late for me to tuck my hands behind my back and wait like a good woman.”

— Alison Goodman

“He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.”

— T.E. Lawrence

“No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.”

— Paul Auster

“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Now, at last, we see a light, bright like that from the rising sun. It biddeth us to learn more that we may prosper more. With a new understanding we shall find honorable ways to accomplish our desires." "Let us go to Arkad this very day," Bansir urged, "Also, let us ask other friends of our boyhood days, who have fared no better than ourselves, to join us that they, too, may share in his wisdom." "Thou wert ever thus thoughtful of thy friends, Bansir. Therefore hast thou many friends. It shall be as thou sayest. We go this day and take them with us.”

— George S. Clason

“Too many men want the freedoms, rewards, and privileges of manhood but only the responsibilities of boyhood. They want intimacy with their wives without loving them as God instructed. They want to be respected by their kids without investing time and discipline in them. They want a higher status at work without raising their own level of honor and integrity.”

— Stephen Kendrick

“I suppose you could sum up the religious aspects of my boyhood by saying it was a time of life when I was taught the difference between right and wrong as it specifically applied to Catholicism.”

— Robert Vaughn

“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

“Isaac's face lit up. The phrase was literally true in his case, for his cheeks and the tip of his nose shone rosily and his blue eyes were suddenly as flooded with light as sapphires held to the sun. In the country of his mind the advancing shadows were halted and rolled back upon themselves like the fen mists when the wind suddenly freshened from the sea. He glowed and the Dean felt a pang of sadness. What would this man have been, what would he have done, had he not been so wrenched from the true by the sufferings of his boyhood? Yet perhaps without them he would not have been Bella's fairy man. Such twistings sometimes forced out poison but at other times honey. It depended what was at the heart of a man.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

“My boyhood life in New York City has impressed me with the popular ignorance and also with the great need of something better than local lore and weather proverbs.”

— Cleveland Abbe

“One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations of every natural act.”

— Booth Tarkington

“Her profession did not fascinate him in the least, and he had no boyhood memories of tenderness or embarrassment to soften him toward the subtleties of her trade; when he looked at her, he saw only a catalogue of indiscretions.”

— Eleanor Catton

“I'm hardly digging trenches for a living. I'm getting to tap into my boyhood fantasies of being a larger-than-life character.”

— Joel Edgerton

“The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University; so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South.”

— James Weldon Johnson

“The words Lafayette used to describe that triumph-"I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence"-applied to getting his way regarding America as well. Perhaps the most emblematic anecdote foretelling Lafayette's stubborn refusal to give up his American dream was the boyhood story about how one day, one of his Parisian schoolteachers was talking up the virtues of an obedient horse. According to Lafayette, "I described the perfect horse as one which, at the sight of the whip, had the sense to throw his rider to the ground before he could be whipped.”

— Sarah Vowell

“I worked on a farm. Played ball and loafed along the fishing and swimming holes of the White River, and my boyhood was not a lot different from that of other youngsters.”

— Chuck Klein

“Right now I'm living my boyhood dream, which was to play for a European club. The fact that it's a huge club like Barcelona makes it a tremendous honour. I like everything about the city: the climate, the people. It's quite similar to Brazil, which helps a lot. There's even a beach!”

— Neymar

“All my boyhood, all I ever wanted was to be loved.”

— Norman Wisdom

“Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.”

— Diane Setterfield

“One Life With Many Names, Childhood, Boyhood, Manhood And Old, Then? Then! All Unknown, Uncertain Destination ...”

— Muhammad Imran Hasan

“Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.”

— Gregory Benford

“The glory of the nation rests in the character of her men. And character comes from boyhood. Thus, every boy is a challenge to his elders.”

— Herbert Hoover

“From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.
- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

“Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.”

— Oscar Wilde

“He revealed nothing. He nodded gravely. "I suppose it might be, ma'am, but I was hired to do the job and take the risks." "Figured I'd offer," Thomas said, unwilling to let the matter drop. "You tell me what you figure to do, and I'll be glad to help." "Another time." The marshal tasted his coffee again and looked directly at the girl. "You are new in Sentinel. Will you be staying long?" "No." "Do you have relatives here?" "No." He waited, but no explanation was offered. Fitz Moore was puzzled and he studied her from the corners of his eyes. There was no sound in the room but the ticking of the big, old-fashioned clock. The girl sat very still, the delicate line of her profile bringing to him a faint, lost feeling, a nostalgia from his boyhood when such women as she rode to hounds, when there was perfume on the air, blue grass, picket fences ...”

— Louis L’Amour

“He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.”

— Robert Penn Warren

“If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?”

— Vincent Van Gogh

“Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick's face ... The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.”

— Michael Chabon

“I never had any boyhood ambitions.”

— Daniel Craig

“Between the innocence of boyhood and the dignity of manhood, we find a delightful creature called a boy ... A boy is truth with dirt on its face, beauty with a cut on its finger, wisdom with bubble gum in its hair and the hope of the future with a frog in its pocket.”

— Alan Beck

“The progress from infancy to boyhood is imperceptible. In that long dawn of the mind we take but little heed. The years pass by us, one by one, little distinguishable from each other. But when the intellectual sun of our life is risen, we take due note of joy and sorrow.”

— Bryan Procter

“There was a part, you know, obviously there was a part of the whole I military experience that you know like hooks right into the whole boyhood experience that that you know most American boys have growing up, you know, which is proving your manhood by proving how hard you are, by proving that you can take it.”

— Peter P. Mahoney

“From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them.”

— Larry Watson

“When we travel we find how greatly our boyhood dreams are outstripped by reality .”

— R. A. Lafferty

“When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.”

— Mark Twain

“I came out of a culture in which my uncle, my father - they were all salesmen of one kind or another. My father was a manufacturer. He also, in effect, had to sell that stuff. And if he didn't literally do it, his men did. So, selling was in the air through my boyhood. The whole idea of successfully selling was very important.”

— Arthur Miller

“In my own experience I have found that the most extravagant dreams of boyhood have not surpassed the great experience of being in the Will of God, and I believe that nothing could be better. That is not to say that I do not want other things, and other ways of living, and other places to see, but in my right mind I know that my hopes and plans for myself could not be any better than He has arranged and fulfilled them. Thus may we all find it, and know the truth of the Word which says, He will be our guide even until death.”

— Jim Elliot

“You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.”

— John Updike

“My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.”

— Karl Kraus

“Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten.”

— Charles Dickens

“That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.”

— William Butler Yeats

“The priceless treasure of boyhood is his endless enthusiasm, his high store of idealism, his affections and his hopes. When we preserve these, we have made men. We have made citizens and we have made Americans.”

— Herbert Hoover