Quotes about children
page 11

“She announced her age right away, for children consider their ages every bit as important as their names.”

Trenton Lee Stewart The Mysterious Benedict Society

Source: The Mysterious Benedict Society

“Quiet Prayer:
As long as the sun shall rise goes the old lovers vow. But we are children of a scientific age & have no time for poetry. Still, I offer a quiet prayer of thanks for the sunlight each time I see your face.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Age, Lovers, Time, Sun

“It is the responsibility of every adult… to make sure that children hear what we have learned from the lessons of life and to hear over and over that we love them and that they are not alone.”

Marian Wright Edelman (1939) American children's rights activist

Love, Life, Learning

“Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.”

Barbara Kingsolver book High Tide in Tucson

Source: High Tide in Tucson

“If you make my children, make any child, feel bad for who they are, I will teach you why people fear mama grizzlies more than papa grizzlies.”

Patricia Briggs book Dead Heat

Source: Dead Heat

People, Fear, Feeling

“He touched the rough crucifix that lay against his chest and whispered to the moving air, "Lord, that she might be safe, she and my children." Then turned his cheek to her reaching hand and touched her throught the veils of time.”

Diana Gabaldon book The Scottish Prisoner

Source: The Scottish Prisoner

Time

“And you will understand all too soon
That you, my children of battle, are your heroes”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

Source: The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

Understanding

“One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline…. But also every single day a kid needs a break.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“After all, a woman didn't leave much behind in the world to show she'd been there. Even the children she bore and raised got their father's name. But her quilts, now that was something she could pass on.”

Sandra Dallas American writer

World

“My dear children!"
Nellie whopped him upside the head with her backpack.
"Ow!" Uncle Alistair curled over, cupping his hand over his good eye.
"Nellie!" Amy said.
"Sorry," Nellie muttered. "I thought he was one of the bad guys.”

Rick Riordan The Maze of Bones

Source: The Maze of Bones

Guy

“Perhaps it takes courage to raise children..”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

Courage, For Parents, For Mother

“All I can think of is the emaciated bodies of children on our kitchen table as my mother prescribes what the parent's can't give. More food.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Food, Thinking, Parent

“The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.”

Bret Easton Ellis book Less Than Zero

Source: Less Than Zero

People, Parent, Madness

“This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.”

Lynda Barry (1956) Cartoonist

Source: One Hundred Demons

Way, Forgetting

“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”

Guy Debord book The Society of the Spectacle

Source: The Society of the Spectacle

“Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Love, God, Family

“It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Jessica, Act 3, sc. 1
Dirty Hands (1948)

Time

“Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

People, Age

“When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, an evasion simply muddles 'em.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 9
Atticus Finch
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“A man's immortality can be found in his children.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Source: Raven's Shadow

“Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.”

John Wilmot (1748–1815) English politician

Funny, Wedding, For Parents

“On the off chance that you have children, don't clean up at all. As children, my brother and sister and I loved waking up early and playing cocktail party with the leftover debris”

Amy Sedaris (1961) American comedian

Love, Sister, Chance

“They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.”

Gaston Leroux book The Phantom of the Opera

Source: The Phantom of the Opera

Time, Heart, Hurt

“Love is for children. I owe him a debt.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Love

“It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows”

Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…

Cars, Funny

“Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Funny

“People talk about nature as a mother, but to me she's always been Medea, ready and willing to slaughter her children.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ill Wind

People, Nature

“My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

Love, Funny

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Henry, Act II, scene V
Source: The Real Thing (1982)

World, Thinking, Dead

“Woman and children can afford to be careless, men can not"-Don Corleone”

Mario Puzo The Godfather

Source: The Godfather

Men

“Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was — which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

PENN Address (2004)
Source: U2 By U2

People, Age

“When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Men, Learning

“From biscuit to brides, if there is anything their children really want, parents have a problem.”

Chetan Bhagat book 2 States: The Story of My Marriage

Source: 2 States: The Story of My Marriage

Problem, Parent

“Just like children, emotions heal when they are heard and validated.”

Jill Bolte Taylor (1959) American neuroscientist

Source: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

“Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it, hotheadedness isn't.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 9
Atticus Finch
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Learning, Time

“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

Love

“I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Source: The Cloister Walk

Life, Religion, Way

“Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.”

Brian Selznick book The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Source: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

War, Appearance, Time, Baby

“To his children, Will showed the same love he had always shown to her, fierce and unyielding. And the same protectiveness he had only ever showed to one other person: the person James had been named after. Will’s parabatai, Jem.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Whitechapel Fiend

Love, Personality

“My children are so rarely happy. I… I would like to see you be an exception.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Happiness

“I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony. So, I shall end an old maid, and teach your ten children to embroider cushions and play their instruments very ill.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Love

“My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Daughters

“I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Family, Imagination, Thinking

“Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Complete Essays 3, 1930-35

Intelligence

“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 … We never understand what we're praying, and God, in His mercy, does not answer our prayers according to our understanding, but according to His wisdom.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Lufkin, Texas http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/lufkin-texas-jul1997-full.html (July 19, 1997) <br class="br">In Concert

Wisdom, God, Understanding

“He licked at her lips."We are going to have some amazing children. The best this world has ever seen.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Seduce the Darkness

World

“Siblings: children of the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they get together.”

Sam Levenson (1911–1980) American journalist

Parent, Siblings, Family

“Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.”

Piers Anthony (1934) English-American writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres

Happiness

“Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.”

Roger Lewin (1944) American writer

Problem, For Parents

“To be in your children's memories tomorrow,
You have to be in their lives today.”

Barbara Johnson (1947–2009) American literary critic

Memory, For Parents

“Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“The children of God have more in common then they have differences.”

Henry B. Eyring (1933) American Mormon leader

God

“You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”

Celeste Ng book Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

Source: Everything I Never Told You

Love, Hope

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Love, Hell

“Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Knowledge, Parent

“Behold, my children!" she said. "The instrument of my revenge. I will call it a scythe!"
The Titans muttered among themselves: What is that for? Why is it curved? How do you spell scythe?”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Source: Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

Revenge

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Youth, Parent, Help, Childhood

“No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.”

Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…

Sleep

“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children (1981)

“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)

God, Justice, Democracy, Reality

“No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Love, Alcohol, Way

“Parents always make their worst mistakes with their 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 book Xenocide

Source: Xenocide

Parent

“When I hear people talk about juggling, or the sacrifices they make for their children, I look at them like they're crazy, because 'sacrifice' infers that there was something better to do than being with your children.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

People

“I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books.”

Roald Dahl book Matilda

Source: Matilda

Books, Reading

“You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Source: An Object of Beauty

Art, Thinking

“People like you and me never grow old. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

In a letter to Otto Juliusburger, September 29, 1942. Available in Einstein Archives 38-238
1940s
Variant: Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.
Context: People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live... [We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.

People

“Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Secret, Smile, Memory, Past

“The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Life, Truth, Age

“Ah! Vanitas vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? — Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”

William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair

Vol. II, ch. 27.
Source: Vanity Fair (1847–1848)

Happiness, World, Box

“He laughs. And in his laugh I hear bliss. I hear feet dancing, the rush of skirts twirling. The sound of children.
Is that the first sign of love?
You hear in the person you're destined to love the sound of those yet to be born.”

Alyson Richman (1972) American writer

Source: The Lost Wife

Love, Dance, Personality

“I racked my brain trying to remember the names of all of Nut’s five children. Bit difficult without my brother, the human Wikipedia, around to keep track of such trivia for me.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.”

Jodi Picoult book Keeping Faith

Source: Keeping Faith

People, Feeling

“Leslie had learned two valuable things about the fae that day. They were powerful and charming -- and they ate children and puppies.”

Patricia Briggs book Fair Game

Source: Fair Game

Learning

“In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.”

David Sedaris book Me Talk Pretty One Day

Source: Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)

People, Parting, Country

“I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.”

Marguerite Duras book The Lover

Source: The Lover

Love, Waiting

“It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses”

Jane Smiley (1949) American novelist

Source: A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck

Girl, Horse

“Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”

Charles Stross (1964) British science fiction writer and blogger

Source: Toast, and Other Stories

“Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.”

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987) French writer

Books, Beauty

“Imagine Oshkosh straitjackets for little insane children.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Imagination

“I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

World

“It was a damned good thing men couldn’t have children. Gregory took no shame in admitting that the
human race would have died out generations earlier.”

Julia Quinn book On the Way to the Wedding

Source: On the Way to the Wedding

Men

“I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

“What do you call a planet where bad guys stroll through life with success draped around their shoulders like a King’s cloak, while random horrors are visited upon the innocent heads of children? I call it Earth.”

Jordan Sonnenblick (1969) American writer

Source: Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

Life, Guy, Success

“A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?”

Stephen Colbert book I Am America (And So Can You!)

Source: I Am America

God, Understanding, Teachers, Distant

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Women, Hostility, Religion

“It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.”

Joyce Maynard (1953) American writer

Parent, Sun

“Keep the fire of your testimony of the restored gospel and your witness of our Redeemer burning so brightly that our children can warm their hands by the fire of your faith.”

Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015) American Mormon leader

Faith

“Sadie," he said forlornly, "when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children's.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Dreams, Understanding, Parent

“Well, what are we waiting for?… She said 'children.' I bet that's anyone under a couple of centuries old. Let's go.”

Donita K. Paul (1950) American writer

Source: DragonQuest

Waiting

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Introduction
The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)
Context: Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category.

Time