The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day. Be famous then By wisdom; as thy empire must extend, So let extend thy mind o'er all the world.

-Milton,John
Paradise Regained, bk.4, l.220^3.

Held in the custody of childhood is a locked chest; the adolescent, byonemeans oranother, triestoopenit. the chest is opened: inside, there is nothing.

-Mishima,Yukio pseudonym of  Hiraoka Kimitake
Acts ofWorship,'Cigarette' (translated byJohn Bester,1989).

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood:†all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, fromwhich Isometimesfear that weshall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  Homage to Catalonia, ch.14.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  'Riding Down from Bangor'.

All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

-Parker, Dorothy ne¤  e Rothschild
  In the Paris Review, Summer.

Ich habe um meine Kindheit gebeten, und sie ist wiedergekommen, und ich fu«  hle, dass sie immer noch so schwer ist wie damals, und dass es nichts genu«  tzt hat,  a« lter zu werden. I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all. 687

-Rilke, Rainer Maria
  DieAufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (translated by Stephen Mitchell in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1989).

In ancient shadows and twilights Where childhood had strayed, The world's great sorrows were born And its heroes were made. In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.

-Russell, GeorgeWilliam pseudonym  Ó
  Enchantment and Other Poems,'Germinal'.

Hab|¤a un solo t u¤ nel, oscuro y solitario: el m|¤o, el t u¤ nel en que hab|¤a transcurrido mi infancia, mi juventud, toda mi vida† Yentonces, mientras yo avanzaba siempre por mi pasadizo, ella viv|¤a afuera su vida normal, la vida agitada que llevan esas gentes que viven afuera. There was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life† And then, while I kept moving through my passageway, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of people who live outside.

-Sa¤  bato, Ernesto
  El tu¤  nel, ch.36 (translated asThe Outsider,1950).

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably wantto know iswhere Iwasborn, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind ofcrap, but Idon't feel likegoing into it.

-Salinger,J(erome) D(avid)
The Catcher in the Rye, ch.1.

She was cut off fromthe past and therefore did not live in the present. But suddenly, as she stood close against a pine tree and breathed in its sharp, bitter scent, a clear space opened to her childhood, as though a wind had sprung fromthesea, clearing a mist.It wasnot a memory from the past, it was the past itself, as alive, as real; and she knew that she and the child of forty years ago were the same person.

-Thomas, D(onald) M(itchell)
TheWhite Hotel, ch.4.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

-Thoreau, Henry David
  Journal entry,19 Feb.

   Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood.

-Wollstonecraft, Mary also known as Mrs Godwin
  AVindication of the Rights ofWoman, pt.1, ch.2.