Children Quotes - Page 33

I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life.

Tim Kreider

Conversing with children is a fine art.... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word.

Miriam Toews

Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. 'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?' 'Yes, God has blessed me with all these children,' the rabbi replied. 'Haven't you heard about the population problem?'the woman sniffed. 'How many more children do you want to have?' Rabbi Teller paused and looked the woman in the eye: 'About 6 million,' he said.

Lynn Vincent

I know what I really want for Christmas.I want my childhood back.Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child, of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of or hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded and terribly vulnerable to joy.

Robert Fulghum

Because she did not look behind, September did not see the smoky-glass casket close itself primly up again. She did not see it bend in half until it cracked, and Death hop up again, quite well, quite awake, and quite small once more. She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest, but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.

Catherynne M. Valente

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.

Jerry Spinelli

Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objectsof affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing afaded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me nowto remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, halffancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it wasfolded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I wascomparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.

Charlotte Brontë

In a woman's womb another chance to makethe world a better place.

Ellen Hopkins

Someone once told me that children are like kites. You struggle just to get them in the air; they crash; you add a longer tail. Then they get caught in a tree; you climb up and bring them down, and untangle the string; you run to get them aloft again. Finally, the kite is airborne, and it flies higher and higher, as you let out more string, until it's so high in the sky, it looks like a bird. And if the string snaps, and you've done your job right, the kite will continue to soar in the wind, all by itself.

Charmian Carr

If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

Paul Graham

Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about.""Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre.

Marisha Pessl

The move towards the extension of personhood to children is already underway, and is utterly, completely and totally unstoppable!

Stefan Molyneux

The small hopes and plans and pleasures of children should be tenderly respected by grown-up people, and never rudely thwarted or ridiculed.

Louisa May Alcott

Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

It takes so little to make a child happy, that it is a pity in a world full of sunshine and pleasant things, that there should be any wistful faces, empty hands, or lonely little hearts.

Louisa May Alcott

I spend half my time comforting the afflicated, and the other half afflicting the comfortable.

Wess Stafford

As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls.

Tao Lin

…she rejoiced as only mothers can in the good fortunes of their children.

Louisa May Alcott

Her magic formula for dealing with children is ignoring all faults and accenting tiny virtues. She says, "Instead of telling Tommy day in and day out that he is the naughtiest boy in the United States of America, which could very well be true, take an aspirin and comment on his neatly tied shoes. Almost anybody would rather be known for expert shoe-tying than for kicking the cat." She always tells whiners how charming they are--bullies how brave--bad sports how good--sneaks how honest!

Betty MacDonald

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

Chuck Palahniuk

The children almost broken by the world become the adults most likely to change it.

Frank Warren

Have times really changed? Don't we today, as always, love our children and want them to live righteously? Don't we today, as always, need God's divine protecting care? Don't we today, as always, continue to be at his mercy and in his debt for the very life he has given us?

Thomas S. Monson

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

John Fowles

I was very pleased with your kind letter. Until now I never dreamed of being something like a hero. But since you've given me the nomination I feel that I am one.

Albert Einstein

You cannot sacrifice the world for your children.

Patricia Briggs

Do you really think we'll ever--""I do," he said with certainty, not letting me finish. He leaned over and kissed my forehead. "I know it, Sassenach, and so do you. You were meant to be a mother, and I surely dinna intend to let anyone else father your children.

Diana Gabaldon

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

C.S. Lewis

Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid..and wish you'd just stayed in bed?

Ransom Riggs

Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.

Joe Hill

Bear in mind, children, that they listen to you because you are kids—not because you are right. That's how our Father listens to us.

Rich Mullins

within the core of each of us is the child we once were. This child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are, and what we will be.

Rhawn Joseph

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

Alice Hoffman

Glimmer, I hear someone call her - ugh, the names the people in District 1 give their children are so ridiculous ...

Suzanne Collins

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.

Anita Shreve

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.

Wilkie Collins

Our greatest duty to our children is to love them first. Secondly, it is to teach them. Not to frighten, force, or intimidate our children into submission, but to effectively teach them so that they have the knowledge and tools to govern themselves.

Richelle E. Goodrich

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.

Anatole Broyard

Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew.""He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six.""Right.""And you're the oldest.""Yes.""That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

Orson Scott Card

Before I had kids, I always found it funny how people would talk about their children like they were the cutest things on the planet and how every little thing they did was endlessly fascinating. Now that I've had kids, I can say with certainty that, my children really are the cutest things on this planet and every little thing they do is endlessly fascinating...

Jennifer Miller

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

Douglas Coupland

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

Rita Dove

Are parents always more ambitious for their children than they are for themselves?

Jeffrey Archer

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.

John Irving

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

Neil Gaiman

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.

Caitlin Moran

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

Margaret Wise Brown

I just want my kids to love who they are, have happy lives and find something they want to do and make peace with that. Your job as a parent is to give your kids not only the instincts and talents to survive, but help them enjoy their l

Susan Sarandon

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

Barbara Kingsolver

No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.

Catherynne M. Valente

I will continue to freak out my children by knitting in public. It's good for them.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery.

Ludwig van Beethoven

If I had my child to raise all over again,I’d finger paint more, and point the finger less.I’d do less correcting, and more connecting.I’d take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes.I would care to know less, and know to care more.I’d take more hikes and fly more kites.I’d stop playing serious, and seriously play.I’d run through more fields, and gaze at more stars.I’d do more hugging, and less tugging.I would be firm less often, and affirm much more.I’d build self esteem first, and the house later.I’d teach less about the love of power, and more about the power of love.

Diane Loomans

If you were my child, I would staple you to your bedroom wall.

Myra McEntire

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

E.M. Forster

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

John Updike

...the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so.

Roald Dahl

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

Erik Erikson

[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.

Jodi Picoult

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

Michael Chabon

And what could my father possibly want with another child, when he hardly bothered to talk to the one he already had?

Polly Shulman

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Children Quotes - Page 33

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