Precocity Quotes

I was a precocious child. Everyone called me sassy.

I was, like, forty at birth. When I wasn't even a year old, I spoke, I was potty trained, I walked and talked. That was it. Then I started school and drove everybody crazy because they realized I had popped out as an adult. I had adult questions and wanted adult answers.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

Before I was a year old I walked and talked and I was even potty trained. When I started going to school I think I got on everyone's nerves because I used to ask adult questions rather than settle for the stuff usually fed to kids.

At ten I was bright.

For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.

To be premature is to be perfect

To laugh, if but for an instant only, has never been granted to man before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity.

I always knew I was brainy. It struck me when I was a child that I wanted to be an adult because I never felt I belonged among children whose minds were so much simpler than mine.

I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy.

I was, like, a really embarrassing, precocious child.

Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.

It took me a long time to make that leap to being a grown-up and responsible adult because I carried on being a child actor into my late twenties. It's OK to be precocious when you're young, but when you're a man of about 27 or 28 and playing a 17-year-old in a TV show, it kind of prolongs your childhood.

Having been built in the fashion I was as a child - created and then deflated - has left me with a distinct feeling of failure. Because I did not live up to my precocity, I experience it to be like a cross between a has-been and a never-was.

The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.

Nothing worse than when a 6 acts like a 10.