Quotes about children
page 9

“Children are the ones that know exactly what's going on in the world, you know. They 'see' more than adults, 'believe' in more, are honest, and will always, 'always' let you know where you stand.”

Cecelia Ahern book If You Could See Me Now

Source: If You Could See Me Now

World

“Consequently, if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan's power comes from God and so that Satan is simply God's child, and that we are God's children also. There are no children of Satan, really.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

God

“Remember, children. For every exit, there is also an entrance. ~ Milligan, The Mysterious Benedict Society”

Trenton Lee Stewart (1970) Novelist

“Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940) American writer

Thinking, Relationship, For Parents

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Walking on Water (1980)

Thinking

“Roland had sworn off children—they kept trying to kill him.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bleeds

“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”

Peter de Vries (1910–1993) American editor and novelist

Marriage

“I've always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.”

Richard Adams (1920–2016) English novelist best known as the author of Watership Down

Books, Reading

“There are problems and there are children. It is our aim to separate the two.”

Anthony Horowitz book Point Blanc

Source: Point Blank

Problem

“The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Confidence, Horse

“They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Source: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction. These people with dead children, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself. There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 3

Love, People, Books, World

“We are all children until our fathers die.”

Melissa Bank book The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Source: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.”

Kathryn Harrison book The Kiss

Source: The Kiss

Love, Thinking, Parent

“Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development, compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.”

Simon Baron-Cohen (1958) psychologist and author

Source: Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty

Parent

“And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1

Grass

“It warmed my heart that my children had the right priorities: their skills, their images, their views on YouTube.”

Rick Riordan book The Hidden Oracle

Source: The Hidden Oracle

Heart

“Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Color, Mathematics, Light

“In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Life, Happiness, Youth, Appearance

“I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting…. I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children.”

Barbara Cooney (1917–2000) American writer and illustrator of children's books

Drawing, Country

“I used to believe my father about everything but then I had children myself & now I see how much stuff you make up just to keep yourself from going crazy.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

“There are all kinds of writers. The best writers write children's books.”

Richard Scarry (1919–1994) author and illustrator from the United States

Source: Busy, Busy Town

Books

“Why do they treat us like children? they said & I said why do you treat them like adults?
& their eyes opened wide & they began to laugh & talk all at once & suddenly everything looked possible again.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Trusting Soul

“I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Life, Money

“Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

People, Age

“People who prefer e-books… think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.”

Joe Queenan (1950) American writer

Source: One for the Books

People, Books, Thinking

“It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?”

Douglas Adams book So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Source: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Animals

“Do you have any idea how stubborn you can look? Our children better never give me that look, althought I won't mind if they give it to you. You'd deserve it.”

Christine Feehan book Night Game

Source: Night Game

Idea

“Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.”

Joanne Harris (1964) British author

Source: The Girl with No Shadow

For Mother

“There are lives I can imagine without children but none of them have the same laughter & noise.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Imagination, Laughter

“Listen to them — children of the night. What music they make.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Dracula referring to the howling of the wolves to Jonathan Harker.
Dracula (1897)

Music, Night

“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world”

Yōko Ogawa book The Housekeeper and the Professor

Source: The Housekeeper and the Professor

World, Nature

“There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.”

Frank Serafini (1945) American politician

Hate, Books, Reading

“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 book Little Men

Source: Little Men

People, Pleasure, Hope

“Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”

Marilynne Robinson book Housekeeping

Source: Housekeeping

Women, Family, Singing

“I am about life. I’m gonna live as hard as i can and as full as i can until i die. And i’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind, before they are even born.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Source: Assata: An Autobiography

Life, Swine

“I'm not going to make movies that tell children, "You should despair and run away".”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

Despair

“The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Way, Home, Funny, For Parents

“If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Feeling, Parent, For Parents

“Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

People, Books, Reading

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

Tear, Grass, Success

“Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals

World, Family, Communication, Change

“Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.”

Cornelia Funke book The Thief Lord

Source: The Thief Lord

“The most sophisticated people I know--inside they're all children. We never really loose a certain sense we had when we were kids.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

People, Sense

“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson

Remarks at the dedication of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, November 1, 1977, Congressional Record, November 4, 1977, vol 123, p. 37287.

Life, Age

“Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.”

Jasper Fforde book The Eyre Affair

Source: The Eyre Affair

“Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.”

William Faulkner book Light in August

Source: Light in August

“When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Happiness, Dogs, Housing, Funny

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

Anne Tyler (1941) American novelist

“Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

God, Thinking, Joy

“And if those children are unresponsive, maybe you can't teach them yet, but you can love them. And if you love them today, maybe you can teach them tomorrow.”

Jeffrey R. Holland (1940) Mormon leader

Love

“When you have children, you're obligated to live.”

Anne Tyler book Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Source: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

Behavior, Nature

“And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

Acceptance speech upon being awarded the Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are (1964), published in Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books, 1956-65, edited by Lee Kingman (1965)
Context: Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious — and what is too often overlooked — is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

“Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.”

Erik H. Erikson book Childhood and Society

Childhood and Society (1950), p. 269

Life, Death, Fear

“But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.”

Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams

Source: Animal Dreams

Love

“All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

“The rich get richer and the poor get - children.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Men

“The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.”

Arthur C. Clarke book 2001: A Space Odyssey

Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Time

“You cannot write for children… They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

As quoted in Boston Globe interview (4 January 1987)

Books

“The worst thing that can be done to children is to drain their energy while correcting them.”

James Redfield book The Celestine Prophecy

Source: The Celestine Prophecy

“You dwell in whitened castles
with deep and poisoned moats
and cannot hear the curses
which fill your children's throats.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

Hunger, Fear

“Never have children, only grandchildren.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

This was said by Vidal's maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, as recalled by Vidal: "My grandfather, Senator Gore ('I never give advice') was suddenly Polonius; he also changed his usual line from 'Never have children, only grandchildren' to 'Be not fruitful, do not multiply.' " [Palimpsest, ch. 3: The Desire and the Successful Pursuit of the Whole]
Misattributed

“Five hundred souls.
I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the the children I carried in my arms.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Soul

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Life, Men, Nature

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Source: An Autobiography

School, Idea

“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”

Elena Ferrante book My Brilliant Friend

Source: My Brilliant Friend

Night

“Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 12, “Puzzle Pieces Fitting” (p. 88)

Thinking, Future, Childhood

“The angel has confided in me that he is going to ask the Lord if he can become Spider-Man. […] The children need heroes, he says. I think he just wants to swing from buildings in tight red jammies.”

Christopher Moore book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Angels, Confidence, Thinking

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

People, Thinking, Funny

“Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth

World, Communication, Learning, Childhood

“Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Rahim Khan, Ch. 3
Variant: Rahim Khan laughed. “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
Source: The Kite Runner (2003)

Books, Color

“She laced her fingers through his. "Good night," she whispered. With their hands clasped like children in a fairy tale, she fell asleep beside him in the dark.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Night

“Words don't hurt you." Which is one of the hugest criminal lies perpetrated by adults against children in this world. Because words hurt more than any physical pain.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnWholly

Pain, World, Hurt

“Welcome to the truth of our world-a massive seed shot out to the stars, filled with deadly children. A seed designed to slay everything it touches.”

Greg Bear book Hull Zero Three

Source: Hull Zero Three

Truth, World, Star

“There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

People, Feeling

“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.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Quoted in the Manchester Guardian (31 December 1977), and Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (1988) https://web.archive.org/web/20000709051930/http://www.bartleby.com/63/90/4790.html edited by James B. Simpson; Says Who?: A Guide To The Quotations Of The Century (1988) by Jonathon Green, p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=xUwOAQAAMAAJ&q=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CK0BEOgBMBk and The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989), p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=bs0J36MpieIC&pg=PA45&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22When%20childhood%20dies%2C%20its%20corpses%20are%20called%20adults%22&f=false

Love, Hell, Childhood