Summations, Chapter 61
Context: The mother may suffer the child to fall sometimes, and to be hurt in diverse manners for its own profit, but she may never suffer that any manner of peril come to the child, for love. And though our earthly mother may suffer her child to perish, our heavenly Mother, Jesus, may not suffer us that are His children to perish: for He is All-mighty, All-wisdom, and All-love; and so is none but He, — blessed may He be!
Letter 123 To Robert Jephson (13 July 1777)
“There is nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by.”
Source: Diana of the Crossways http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4470/4470.txt (1885), Ch. 18.
Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Context: He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.
“Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild;
In Wit, a Man; Simplicity, a Child.”
"Epitaph on Gay" (1733), lines 1-2. Reported in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, sixth edition (Yale University Press, 1970), p. 818. Compare: "Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child", John Dryden, Elegy on Mrs. Killegrew, line 70.
“Helplessness in the face of a child's suffering is the curse of parenthood.”
Source: Aunt Dimity's Good Deed
“Doing things without giving the impression of suffering is a question of good manners.”
Agnelli: The Rules of the Game, Vanity Fair (1991)
“There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.”
“She never stumbles,
she's got no place to fall.
She's nobody's child,
the law can't touch her at all.”
