Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.

How far back into childhood do our memories reach?

Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past...

The years of childhood...My memory runs head-on into a scene that is like a symbol of those years. To me as I am today, that scene represents childhood itself, past and irrecoverable.When I saw the scene I felt the hand of farewell with which childhood would take its leave of me. I had a premonition at that instant that all my feeling of subjective time, or timelessness, might one day gush forth from within me and flood into the mold of that scene, to become an exact imitation of its people and movements and sounds; that simultaneous with the completion of this copy, the original might melt away into the distant perspectives of real and objective time;and that I might be left with nothing more than the mere imitation or, to say it another way, with nothing more than an accurately stuffed specimen of my childhood.

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.

In those early amorphous years of life, when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and everything was Forever

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

Even if I hated my childhood, I am nostalgic for it. How can it be possible? Probably because the past is—in a way—settled. I think that childhood is a moment where the world is growing every day. Every day the world is bigger, reality is bigger, reality is deeper. When you become an adult, everything shrinks. You realize that the world is smaller and smaller, and people's minds are not as big as you thought.

If, even at three years old, we turn to the pleasures of memory, the less that is asserted about the felicity of childhood, the less there will be to dispute.

Time is but memory in the making.

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory