There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.
~Elizabeth Lawrence

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.
~John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells

Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

~William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.
~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860

Childhood is the most beautiful of all life's seasons.
~Author Unknown

Childhood is a promise that is never kept.
~Ken Hill

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
~Katherine Anne Porter

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
~Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (thanks Harold)

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.
~Sam Ewing

In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.

~Christopher Morley, To a Child

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
~Tom Stoppard

I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.

~Lewis Carroll, "Solitude"

It is never too late to have a happy childhood.
~Tom Robbins

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
~Cynthia Ozick

The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day.

~John Milton, Paradise Regained

To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation - is there a worst trade one makes in life?
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Childhood is a short season.
~Helen Hayes

I leave to children exclusively, but only for the life of their childhood, all and every the dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof, with the right to play among them freely, according to the custom of children, warning them at the same time against the thistles. And I devise to children the yellow shores of creeks and the golden sands beneath the water thereof, with the dragon flies that skim the surface of said waters, and and the odors of the willows that dip into said waters, and the white clouds that float on high above the giant trees.
~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898

In the happiest of our childhood memories, our parents were happy, too.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in in a thousand ways, and the Night, and the trail of the Milky Way to wonder at....
~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.
~Herbert Gold

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
~Mark Twain

Childhood is that wonderful time of life when all you need to do to lose weight is take a bath.
~Author Unknown

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.
~Ellen Glasgow

Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.
~Malcolm de Chazal