Quotes about children

page 10

“America used to live by the motto "Father Knows Best." Now we're lucky if "Father Knows He Has Children." We've become a nation of sperm donors and baby daddies.”

“Aren’t you a little old for your mom to be picking out your clothes for you? Really? Shopping at the Children’s Place at your age? I’m sure there’s some third-grader dying to know who bought the last navy I-sore shirt. (Nekoda)”

“In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.”

“I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.”

“… there are some children who aren't really children at all, they're just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them…”

“My philosophy when it came to pets was much like that of having children: You got what you got, and you loved them unconditionally regardless of whatever their personalities or flaws turned out to be.”

“I don't like your tone," was Violet's standard answer when one of her children was winning an argument.”

“Incredible. It never ceases to amaze Starkey how far society will go to protect the children it loves and to discard the ones it doesn’t.”

“With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before”

“Parents are the barometers of emotions for children and it has a domino effect.”

“Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.”

“Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all thirty feet tall.”

“For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.”

“… children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.”

“Now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.”

“It sends out a very clear message: "Mess with us and we'll do something worse than kill you. We'll kill your children.”

“If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.”

“Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.”

“Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.”

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

“All Children Have Brain Damage!”

“Small children are great accepters. They don’t understand shame, or the need to hide things.”

“Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.”

“The difference between children and adults is that they're shorter - not dumber.”

“Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.”

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”

“God, he suddenly understood, was love in its purest form, and in these last months with his children, he had felt His touch as surely as he had heard the music spilling from Ronnie's hands.”

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

“Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.”

“Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.”

“Your name is Lily Whitney. You are the woman I want at my side night and day. I want you to be the mother of my children someday. I want you for my lover. I want you for the person I turn to when the world gets to be too much.”

“You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.”

“Treasures:
The most important thing you leave behind is the stuff that turns into treasures when children find it.”

“We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.”

“What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?”

“I'm not short," Daisy muttered. "Short women are never mysterious, or elegant, or pursued by handsome men. And they're always treated like children. I refuse to be short.”

“I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But I didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the valley of Panjsher on my lips. I ran.”

“Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave
When they think that their children are naive.”

“I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.”

“You're a Dark-Hunter."
He kissed her lightly on the lips. "What I am is a man in love with a woman. I want you, Amanda. For the rest of my blessedly short mortal life. I want to wake at dawn with you in my arms and watch our children play and fight.”

“To the children and the innocent it's all the same.”

“I want you forever, Kate. I want to grow old and have you here in my arms. I want children. I've wanted you for so long. I don't think that's about to change.”

“The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.”

“Children should neither be seen nor heard from – ever again.”

“When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: A stodgy parent is not fun at all! What a child wants - and DESERVES - is a parent who is SPARKY!”

“What are men? Children who doubt.”

“A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children."

from chapter VIII of Les Miserables”

“Many invest wisely in business matters, but fail to invest time and interest in their most valued possessions: their spouses and children.”

“I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children”

“Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.”

“Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbors, our children and our hearts.”

“Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don’t even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that’s wrong.”

“Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.”

“The woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose hands children grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator second only to God.”

“I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.”

“The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs…. It´s us. Only us.”

“Books, the children of the brain.”

“If there is one regret that I have had in my life, it is that I never fathered any children. There are times, when I look at what Fergus and Beryl have produced, when I consider myself fortunate, but there are also times when it breaks my heart.”

“My children were all made from paper and printer's ink…”

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

“That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

“What would you prefer? 'What did the Count eat today, children? One helpless villager, two helpless villagers, three helpless villagers….”

“… I do have to wonder what sort of childhood the Grimm brothers endured. They are not a merry bunch of storytellers, what with their children roasted by witches, maidens poisoned by old crones, and whatnot.”

“Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.”

“The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it.”

“Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.”

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…”

“We find in our children our own selves again, who might be made better than we are.”

“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.”

“The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.”

“In America there are two classes of travel — first class, and with children.”

“There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.”

“I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.”

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

“I like children. If they're properly cooked.”

“I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.”

“The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children”

“They say the only people who tell the truth are drunkards and children. Guess which one I am.”

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”

“We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”

“Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.”

“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow.”

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

“Dad,” I said quietly, “I’ve always made it a rule in my life not to pick fights with children, cute animals, or ignorant old men. I will, however, make an exception for you if you ever touch or insult my wife again.”

“Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say What light and two more to say I didn't turn it on.”

“Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.”

“Lord that she might be safe. She and my children.”

“Children need boundaries, so they can know how far they have to go to get beyond them.”

“Contented children are valuable, as is the peace that surrounds them.”

“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

“Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.”

“Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.”

“Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.”

“That's how children deal with terror, they fall asleep.”

“The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.”

“People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.”

“Why don't they cut their own children's ears into points to make them look sharp? Why don't they cut off their noses to make them look plucky? One would be just as sensible as the other. What right have they to torment and disfigure God's creatures?”

“All children should be loved, protected, nurtured --emotionally and intellectually-- respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.”

“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”