Quotes about children

page 9

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We are all children until our fathers die.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Never have children, only grandchildren.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Just like any woman,… we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.”

“Children are happy because they don't have a file in their minds called "All the Things That Could Go Wrong.”

“I'm not good with children," the god confessed. "Or people. Well, any organic life forms, really.”

“Children are dying."
Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.”

“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”

“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

“In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.”

“All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.”

“The worst thing you can do is nothing. (re: teaching children with autism)”

“What you need to learn, children, is the difference between right and wrong in every area of life. And once you learn the difference, you must always choose the right.”

“I am going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”

“The mother… swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood.”

“young children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations… Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up”

“People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.”

“Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams.”

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

“Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can’t explain them, and those who haven’t known them have no understanding of them at all.”

“Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not—even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian—it's only a matter of time.”

“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.”