Quotes about child
page 23

“Seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.”

John Crowley (1942) American writer

Bk. 2, Ch. 3
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)

Way, Change

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love, Women, God, Secret

“One [film] is based on the Medea myth about a woman who kills her own child -- The Love of Ruins. It is almost a technical exercise to see if I can convince an audience or make an audience sympathetic to a woman who kills her own child.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in Film Quarterly, Winter 1991-92
Interviews

Love, Exercises

“Every culture has a Story of the People to give meaning to the world. Part conscious and part unconscious, it consists of a matrix of agreements, narratives, and symbols that tell us why we are here, where we are headed, what is important, and even what is real. I think we are entering a new phase in the dissolution of our Story of the People, and therefore, with some lag time, of the edifice of civilization built on top of it….
But the new mythos has not yet emerged. We will abide for a time in the space between stories. Those of you who have been through it on a personal level know that it is a very precious - some might say sacred - time. Then we are in touch with the real. Each disaster lays bare the real underneath our stories. The terror of a child, the grief of a mother, the honesty of not knowing why. In such moments we discover our humanity. We come to each other’s aid, human to human. We take care of each other. That’s what keeps happening every time there is a calamity, before the beliefs, the ideologies, the politics take over again.
How can we prepare? We cannot prepare. But we are being prepared.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

Charles Eisenstein, 2013:The Space Between Stories http://charleseisenstein.net/2013-the-space-between-stories/, Charleseisenstein.net, 2013

People, World, Thinking, Time

“Dodgson was overcome by the beauty of Cologne Cathedral. I found him leaning against the rails of the Choir and sobbing like a child. When the verger came to show us over the chapels behind the Choir, he got out of the way, he said that he could not bear the harsh voice of the man in the presence of so much beauty.”

Henry Liddon (1829–1890) British theologian

The Russian Journal, ed. Morton Cohen (1979), p. 13.

Beauty, Way

“What goes on between an actor and the audience, at its best, is a dialogue. Sometimes you watch an actor on stage and somehow the performance isn’t getting through. The fourth wall is not only closed, it’s soundproofed. That’s because the actor isn’t connecting with the living and breathing human beings in the room with him. The audience feels the distance and they react accordingly. As an actor, you have to fire up your sensors at 100 percent all the time. You have to be in touch with all those heartbeats in the audience, connect with them. Sometimes during the Grinch performances, a child will shout out something. And I’ll turn right around, look them in the eye and respond to them.”

Stefán Karl Stefánsson (1975–2018) Icelandic actor

"Industry Insider Interview: Stefan Karl" https://valenti29.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/industry-insider-interview-stefan-karl/ (20 November 2013)

Feeling, Time

“If you would have clear and irrefragable for a perpetual joy, a glory and a defense, the unwavering confidence, "I am Thy child," go to God's throne, and lie down at the foot of it, and let the first thought be, "My Father in heaven;" and that will brighten, that will establish, that will make omnipotent in your life, the witness of the Spirit that you are the child of God.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 17.

Life, God, Lie, Confidence

“The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

"The Siege of Mailer : Hero to Historian" in The Village Voice (21 January 1971); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988), edited by J. Michael Lennon

Books, Baby

“Studies in painting: Non. He learned to express himself by means of art in the same way as the child learns to talk. No teaching is needed for the one who is born an artist, and even the expression 'self-taught' is a phony, he thinks.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in a questionnaire, Max Ernst filled out in 1948, the U.S; as cited in Max Ernst: a Retrospective, ed. Werner Spies & Sabine Rewald, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2005, p. 7
1936 - 1950

Art, Way, Thinking, Study

“No child, I think, can walk through a common market or slaughter-house without receiving moral injury; nor am I quite sure that any virtuous adult can.”

William Alcott (1798–1859) American physician and author

Source: Vegetable Diet (1838), pp. 270-271

Thinking, Housing

“Naked girls with the heads of Marx and Malraux prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights, tried to give them a little joie de vivre but maybe it didn’t take, their constant bickering and smallness, it’s like a stroke of lightning, the world reminds you of its power, tracheotomies right and left, I am spinning, my pretty child, don’t scratch, pick up your feet, the long nights, spent most of my time listening, this is a test of the system, this is only a test.”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

“Aria”, conclusion.
Sixty Stories (1981)

World, Girl, Time, Night

“Here is how [life] happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation — but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again… This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It's what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/synecdoche-new-york-2008 of Synecdoche, New York (5 November 2008) Reviews, Four star reviews

Life, People, Education, Food

“Hearing has its own memory. It registers the dog whose sudden barking startled me as a child. The folk songs my nanny used to sing. The dadaism of a cabaret song from Berlin: ‘I tear out one of my eyelashes and stab you dead with it,’ innocently sung by my mother. Hitler conjuring up the Almighty. The crowing voice of little Goebbels. Alarm sirens, the roar of aircraft, the blast of bombs. Ljuba Welitsch being Salome. The sonorities of Edwin Fischer’s piano playing. María Casares as Lady Macbeth in Avignon. Ralph Kirkpatrick’s two Scarlatti recitals. Gré Brouwenstijn as Leonore in Fidelio. The epiphany of Ligeti’s Aventures et Nouvelles Aventures. The magic application of noise in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All sorts of laughter.”

Alfred Brendel (1931) Austrian pianist, poet, and author

quoted in Alan Rusbridger, "Music, Sense and Nonsense by Alfred Brendel review – a great pianist’s thoughts on his art", The Guardian, 24 September 2015

Dogs, Dreams, Tear, Laughter

“The third article was union. […] By working shoulder to shoulder, together we can increase the bounty of all. We have discovered that every child who learns, every man who finds work, every sick body that is made whole—like a candle added to an altar—brightens the hope of all the faithful. So let us reject any among us who seek to reopen old wounds and to rekindle old hatreds. They stand in the way of a seeking nation. Let us now join reason to faith and action to experience, to transform our unity of interest into a unity of purpose. For the hour and the day and the time are here to achieve progress without strife, to achieve change without hatred—not without difference of opinion, but without the deep and abiding divisions which scar the union for generations.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Inaugural address (1965)

Faith, Hope, Way, Learning

“He crossed his hands on his breast, as he used to do when a child, raised his eyes and said:
"Lord, help me, teach me; come and enter within me and purify me of all this abomination."
He prayed, asked God to help him and purify him, while that which he was praying for had already happened. Not only did he feel the freedom, vigor and gladness of life, but he also felt the power of good. He felt himself capable of doing the best that man can do.”

Leo Tolstoy book Resurrection

Source: Resurrection (1899), Ch. 28

Life, God, Feeling, Freedom

“I believe that most of us are too quick to name things when we are with small children. By simply naming a thing and letting it go at that when a child asks, "What is that?" we communicate that the name or label is the most important thing, that naming is sufficient. We deprive our children of their sense of wonder and discovery by labeling and categorizing things in the physical world. Instead of merely naming a tree, for example, try also guiding your child through an exploration of the tree both physically and mentally. This exploration may include touching, smelling, seeing from various angles, comparing one tree with another, imagining the inside of the tree and the parts underground, listening to the leaves, viewing the tree at different times of the day or during different seasons, planting its seeds, observing how other creatures — birds, moths, bugs — use the tree, and so on. After discovering that every object is fascinating and complex, a child will begin to understand that the label is only a small part of the whole. Thus taught, a child's sense of wonder will survive, even under our modern avalanche of words.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.239

Children, World, Imagination, Communication

“Thus, Mahāmati, wherever there is the evolution of living beings, let people cherish the thought of kinship with them, and, thinking that all beings are [to be loved as if they were] an only child, let them refrain from eating meat. So with Bodhisattvas whose nature is compassion, [the eating of] meat is to be avoided by him. Even in exceptional cases, it is not [compassionate] of a Bodhisattva of good standing to eat meat.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Mahayana, Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, Chapter Eight. On Meat-eating

Love, People, Nature, Thinking

“Back and forth the fantastic tableaux would spin, past his cruel plebe hazing, the self-discovery at the West Texas Military Academy, the patriarchal Judge MacArthur, all beard and cigar smoke, presiding over dynastic feats at Washington's 1201 N Street; the chimes of the drawing-room clock there telling off the quarters; the ceremonial changing of the guard at Leavenworth; his father's tales of Sherman's dauntless Boys in Blue; his mother's imperious commands to fight and fight and never lower his blade short of victory; the clean crack of Krag rifles and the warm prickling of desert sand as he played with his brother outside the fort stockade; the rumbling of the sunset gun and Pinky's face tilting downward, her lambent smile gilding the child's upturned features while he clutched at her cascading skirts; the yellow notes of the bugles as he stirred in his cradle; the chant of sergeants hawking cadence on the parade ground outside; and, snapping proudly in the overarching sky above him, the flag, and the flag, and the flag.”

William Manchester (1922–2004) (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) American author, journalist and historian

Source: American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 (1978), p. 709

Smile, Boy, Change, Past

“Meadowlark inspired me to play for a long time. I thought, 'If he could do it, I can do it.' The legacy that Meadowlark leaves is something that every child and adult can benefit from.”

Robert Parish (1953) American basketball player

Quoted in Trust Your Next Shot: A Guide to a Life of Joy by Meadowlark Lemon (Ascend Books, 2010), p. III https://books.google.it/books?id=_UT_2hRSc9wC&pg=PR3.

Time

“The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving” mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

Love

“who will draw the calvary in
risk his very own precious skin
to make our Angelinia a free and peaceful land again?
Henry
who'll love a poor orphan child?
Henry Darger”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Song lyrics, Motherland (2001), Henry Darger

Love, Peace, Drawing

“Far away I've travelled
To stand once more alone.
And hear my memories echo
Through these hills that I call home.
As a child I roamed this valley,
I watched the seasons come and go.
I spent many hours dreaming
On these hills that I call home.”

Iris DeMent (1961) American singer and songwriter

These Hills
Song lyrics, Infamous Angel (1992)

Dreams, Travel, Home, Memory

“Europe without Greece is like a child without a birth certificate”

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1926–2020) President of France

What roots for European values. The use and abuse of ancient democracy in the debate on Greece’s EU membership from Giscard d Estaing to the debt crisis - CONFERENCE PAPER http://www.academia.edu/4098804/CONFERENCE_PAPER_-_What_roots_for_European_values_The_use_and_abuse_of_ancient_democracy_in_the_debate_on_Greece_s_EU_membership_from_Giscard_d_Estaing_to_the_debt_crisis, 1st page

Birth

“I want every child that's born in the world to be planned and wanted.”

Joycelyn Elders (1933) American pediatrician, public health administrator, and former Surgeon General of the United States

"Dr. Joycelyn Elders is so fucking cool", 2007-06-04, Jessica Valenti, w:Jessica Valenti, 2014-05-23, Feministing.com http://web.archive.org/web/20070713094431/http://feministing.com/archives/007116.html, Abortion

World

“When a parent denies a child its “parent time,” that parent is denying the child its child support -- its psychological child support.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 187.

Support, Parent, Time

“As a child in North London it never crossed my mind that I would ever play the Wicked Witch of the East.”

Rachel Weisz (1970) English actress

Source: hellomagazine.com http://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities/2013030911512/rachel-weisz-us-interview/

“God could have entered the world in any place or family that God chose. God could have become human in a great ruling family in Judea. God could have entered into humanity in a wealthy Galilean family, perhaps as the child of a well-traveled and well-read merchant or scholar. More to the point, God could have chosen to be born into the Roman dynasty, in line to become emperor, to exercise and demonstrate maximum power.Instead, God chose to enter a family headed by a man with a simple profession, married to a woman who, from outward appearances, was no different than the other poor women in their joke of a town.”

James Martin (priest) (1960) Jesuit priest and writer

"How can you be Christian without caring for the poor?" (2017)

Women, God, World, Family

“I support freedom of choice. My choice is to not support abortion, except in cases of a clear-cut choice between the lives of the mother and child. A child conceived through incest or rape is innocent and deserves the right to be born.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

"How I am a Roman Catholic" http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/how-i-am-a-roman-catholic Roger Ebert's Journal (1 March 2013)

Support, Freedom

“Mother brings a child late to contact by half-an-hour; father then requires an extra half-hour the next week. This is getting silly. If, in fact, the father does not see the child at all, of course he should see the child on another occasion, but there are fathers who actually add up the minutes and produce it and say "Now I should have so much more contact because I lost five minutes last week and ten minutes the week before."”

Elizabeth Butler-Sloss (1933) English judge

Testimony before the Constitutional Affairs Committee http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmconst/uc1247-i/uc124702.htm, November 9, 2004

“Never talk ill of anybody, be he a devotee, a monk, or an ordinary householder, nor despise any for a wrong act. After all, everyone is a child of the Lord. Who knows today's sinning will not make him a saint tomorrow? Other acts do not count so much as a moment's of love for the Lord. Blessed is he who has loved Him even for a moment. Saint or sinner, the Lord loves all.”

Swami Adbhutananda Disciple

The Apostles of Sri Ramakrishna

Love

“Give me, O best of celestials, a child endued with great strength and largeness of limbs and capable of humbling the pride of every body.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Kunti to Vayu.
The god of wind thereupon begat upon her the child afterwards known as Bhima of mighty arms and fierce prowess.
The Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXXIII

“Like a lusty child, government with us has expanded in nature and grown great in stature, but has also become awkward in movement… English and American political history has been a history, not of administrative development, but of legislative oversight-not of progress in governmental organization, but of advance in law-making and political criticism… We go on criticising when we ought to be creating.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Source: 1880s, "The Study of Administration," 1887, p. 203; as cited in: Dimock (1937;28)

Law, History, Nature

“All dreads other than reverent dread that are proffered to us, though they come under the colour of holiness yet are not so true, and hereby may they be known asunder. — That dread that maketh us hastily to flee from all that is not good and fall into our Lord’s breast, as the Child into the Mother’s bosom, with all our intent and with all our mind, knowing our feebleness and our great need, knowing His everlasting goodness and His blissful love, only seeking to Him for salvation, cleaving to with sure trust: that dread that bringeth us into this working, it is natural, gracious, good and true. And all that is contrary to this, either it is wrong, or it is mingled with wrong. Then is this the remedy, to know them both and refuse the wrong.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 74

Love, Nature

“Ooh, he's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

“A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction, he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions, but also entire world view, he is the inventor of entire forms of like.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

pg 38, italics are feyerabends.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

World, Law, Music, Way

“Past are three summers since she first beheld
The ocean; all around the child await
Some exclamation of amazement here.
She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,
Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?
That wondrous soul Charoba once possest,—
Capacious, then, as earth or heaven could hold,
Soul discontented with capacity,—
Is gone (I fear) forever. Need I say
She was enchanted by the wicked spells
Of Gebir, whom with lust of power inflamed
The western winds have landed on our coast?
I since have watcht her in lone retreat,
Have heard her sigh and soften out the name.”

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) British writer

Gebir, Book I (1798). It is reported that "these lines were specially singled out for admiration by Shelley, Humphrey Davy, Scott, and many remarkable men"; Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), citing Forster, Life of Landor, vol. i. p. 95.

Fear, Soul, Past, Summer

“The Constitution forbids the passing of a bill of attainder: that is, a law entailing upon the child the disabilities and hardships imposed upon the parent. Every slave law in America might be repealed on this very ground. The slave is made a slave because his mother is a slave. But to all this it is said that the practice of the American people is against my view. I admit it. They have given the Constitution a slaveholding interpretation. I admit it. Thy have committed innumerable wrongs against the Negro in the name of the Constitution. Yes, I admit it all; and I go with him who goes farthest in denouncing these wrongs. But it does not follow that the Constitution is in favor of these wrongs because the slaveholders have given it that interpretation. To be consistent in his logic, the City Hall speaker must follow the example of some of his brothers in America — he must not only fling away the Constitution, but the Bible. The Bible must follow the Constitution, for that, too, has been interpreted for slavery by American divines. Nay, more, he must not stop with the Constitution of America, but make war with the British Constitution, for, if I mistake not, the gentleman is opposed to the union of Church and State. In America he called himself a Republican. Yet he does not go for breaking down the British Constitution, although you have a Queen on the throne, and bishops in the House of Lords.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

War, People, Law, Parent

“I was cast as a college girl and that wasn’t really hard to play as I was very young then. I was treated as a child on the sets. When the movies finally hit the theatres, all the newspapers carried reviews that said, ‘What natural acting.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

In "There's no slowing down for Vyjayanthimala".

Girl, Nature

“At a certain age children are greatly intrigued by the possibility of locating themselves on a map. It appears strange that one's familiar life should actually have all occurred in an area delineated by a set of quite impersonal (and hitherto unfamiliar) coordinates on the surface of the map. The child's exclamations of "I was there" and "I am here right now" betray the astonishment that the place of last summer's vacation, a place marked in memory by such sharply personal events as the ownership of one's first dog or the secret assembling of a collection of worms, should have specific latitudes and longitudes devised by strangers to one's dog, one's worms, and oneself. This locating of oneself in configurations conceived by strangers is one of the important aspects of what, perhaps euphemistically, is called "growing up". One participates in the real world of grown-ups by having an address. The child who only recently might have mailed a letter addressed "To my Granddaddy" now informs a fellow worm-collector of his exact address – street, town, state and all – and finds his tentative allegiance to the grown-up world view dramatically legitimated by the arrival of the letter.”

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) Austrian-born American sociologist

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), p. 81

Life, Children, Secret, Age

“So, Huelsenbeck has put our feud in print -- HA HA
So he sneers at my bourgeois home -- my child
who cries, who has to be changed and fed
So he laughs at my solid wife -- that she's no Anna Bloom…”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1920s, Huelsendada', Kurt Schwitters, 1920

Home, Change

“Eve Moira had been a child of London, fascinated by the natural world, but drawn to the city. So, Kath Two looked to the bright lights of the big city.
Here, that meant gazing up into the sky.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

World, Nature, Light

“I saw a woman of thirty-five, living peacefully in the bosom of her family after an interrupted novitiate, show sudden signs of incomprehensible nervous terror, speak of possible 'reprisals', and refuse to go out alone. A very dear friend, took pity on her, offered her shelter. 'Come, child, what have you to fear? You're one of God's little lambs…' 'Harmless? That's all you know! Everybody thinks as you do, and nobody's frightened of me. Well - you can find out for yourself. I had eight men shot, madame…”

Georges Bernanos book Les grands cimetières sous la lune

Source: Les grands cimetieres sous la lune (A Diary of My Times) 1938, p.87-88

Men, God, Fear, Family

“Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hay-fields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education.
By being well acquainted with all these they come into most intimate harmony with nature, whose lessons are, of course, natural and wholesome.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Education, Nature, Tree, Water

“Child of God, if you would have your thought of God something beyond a cold feeling of His presence, let faith appropriate Christ.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 234.

God, Faith, Feeling, Christ

“You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

Writers at Work interview (1963)

People, Intelligence, Understanding

“Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon—provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

Medawar, Peter (1982). Pluto's Republic, p. 99. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1980s

Nature, Sense

“I think it’s very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the emancipation proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less in an all-knowing government.”

Robert A. Hall (1946) American politician

I'm Tired (February 19, 2009)

Thinking, Freedom

“In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.”

Charles Dickens book Great Expectations

Source: Great Expectations (1860-1861), Ch. 7

Children, World, Horse

“Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.”

Robertson Davies book The Cunning Man

Part 1, section 6.
The Cunning Man (1994)

“Of all the world's evils, child abuse may rank as the greatest.”

Dennis Prager (1948) American writer, speaker, radio and TV commentator, theologian

Dennis Prager. "The Doritos Ad Was Not Funny" http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2010/02/16/the_doritos_ad_was_not_funny/page/full at townhall.com, 16 February 2010. 2010s

World, Evil

“You judge a society by how it treats its citizens. We must do our best to ensure that every child can live in comfort and security, with the best possible education.”

Melania Trump (1970) Slovenian model, wife of Donald Trump and First Lady of the United States

Speech at 2016 Republican National Convention http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-republican-convention-2016-live-melania-trump-speech-is-the-wrong-1468897600-htmlstory.html (July 18, 2016)

Education

“Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Song (Go and Catch a Falling Star), stanza 1

Star, Singing, Past, Envy

“Hillary (Clinton) has spent decades doing the relentless work to actually make a difference in their lives. Advocating for kids with disabilities as a young lawyer, fighting for children's health care as first lady, and for quality child care in the senate.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, 2016 Democratic National Convention (2016)

Children, Health, Fight

“A modest young lady with her head the same size as it was when she was a child.”

Jimmy Magee (1935–2017) Gaelic games commentatot

Commenting on Katie Taylor's lack of a big head despite her success. irishtimes.com http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0811/1224321996178.html Olympic Games

“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Orual
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

Men, God, Art, Soul

“How can anyone think so insanely that the human life has the same value and mankind, the same morality, independent of numbers? It is lucid to me that everytime a new child is born, the value of every human in world decreases slightly. It is obvious to me that the morality of the population explosion is wholly unlike than when man was a sparse, noble species in its beginning.”

Pentti Linkola (1932) Finnish ecologist

The Doctrine Of Survival And Doctor Ethics (1992)

Life, World, Thinking

“Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own."”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower, st. 1 (1799).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Flowers, Nature, Sun

“Why do we lack innovation in India? Because, we don't allow questioning. We don't promote inquisitiveness. If a child asks questions in school, he is asked to sit down. This should not go on. We need to promote inquisitiveness, children should ask questions”

Prakash Javadekar (1951) Indian politician

as quoted in " Students should rebel, challenge status quo to innovate, says Prakash Javadekar http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Students-should-rebel-challenge-status-quo-to-innovate-says-Prakash-Javadekar/articleshow/53098941.cms", Times of India (07 July 2016)

Children, School, Question

“I can’t think why Delio [son] has not been told that I’m in prison, and why no one reflected that he might then find out about it indirectly, that is, in the most disagreeable way for a child, who then begins to doubt the truthfulness of those educating him, to think about it on his own account and draw apart. At least, that was my experience as a child: I remember it perfectly... I believe in treating children as rational creatures with whom it is possible to discuss even the most serious matters. This makes a very profound impression on them, it strengthens their character and above all it avoids leaving their development at the mercy of random environmental pressures and casual, impersonal encounters. It really is very strange how grown-ups forget they were children themselves, and make no use of their own experiences. For my part, I recall vividly how offended I was at every discovery of a subterfuge, even if it was meant to keep painful facts from me, and how this shut me up within myself and made me withdraw.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci cited in Fiori, 1970, pp. 22-23.

Pain, Children, Truth, Education

“To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Simplicity http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21390/Simplicity From the poems written in English

Life, Secret, Smile

“It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? Is it by a philosophical explanation that the sounds were made by the rats in the partition? Is it by imparting entomological knowledge? No; it is by the mother taking the child in her lap, and singing sweetly to it, and rocking it. And the child thinks nothing of the explanation, but only of the mother.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 599

God, Soul, Knowledge, Thinking

“Every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a starving child. When I look into her eyes, do I remain silent?”

Philip Wollen (1950) Australian philanthropist

"Animals Should Be Off the Menu" (2012)

Tear

“O child! dear child!
Above the clouds I lift my wing
To hear the bells of Heaven ring;
Some of their music, though my flights be wild,
To Earth I bring;
Then let me soar and sing!”

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) American poet, critic, and essayist

"The Singer" (1860).

Music, Singing

“The meaning of relativity has been widely misunderstood. Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll. Relativity, as I see it, merely denotes that certain physical and mechanical facts, which have been regarded as positive and permanent, are relative with regard to certain other facts in the sphere of physics and mechanics. It does not mean that everything in life is relative and that we have the right to turn the whole world mischievously topsy-turvy.”

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

1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Life, World

“Enlightened business is learning that competition ought not to cause bad social consequences which inevitably react upon the profits of business itself. All but the hopelessly reactionary will agree that to conserve our primary resources of man power, government must have some control over maximum hours, minimum wages, the evil of child labor and the exploitation of unorganized labor.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Message to Congress on establishing minimum wages and maximum hours (1937)

Business, Learning, Evil

“A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”

Stephen King book It

It (1986)

Life, Idea, Birth, Sense

“The most unacknowledged spending expectation among women is the amount of time spent by single mothers caring for children, not only physically, but psychologically. It is my feeling that only a small percentage of a mother’s time is normally compensated for by child support, given what a woman could make adding these hours to workforce hours… It is why women who have never been married and never had children earn so much more in the workplace than women who have had children.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 222.

Women, Children, Feeling, Support

“I hope that the general public will try to regard wolves like every other creature rather than giving them some sort of a very special position in the wild. The wolf is like a cougar or a bear or any other species. It was endangered, and it was regarded as the poster child for endangered species, but it is recovered now, and it should be managed like any other creature. If the public can accept that, that would be the biggest thing I could hope for.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9pXeVx5HKA (April 7, 2010), Wildlife Society.

Hope, Wolf

“The impact of the human tragedies I've reported on is that, more often than not, I'll be angry. I want to know why is this child dying? These are not acts of God; they're results of respectable politicians' decisions.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

John Pilger, This much i know http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/13/pressandpublishing.observermagazine, The Observer, 13 November 2005

God, Decision

“I can't tell you how many terrorists we let go, we let get away, because we were worried about a woman or a child dying in the process.”

Brett Velicovich (1983)

An elite soldier on using drones to hunt terrorists — and giving the kill order http://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/17/15961420/drone-terrorist-iraq-afghanistan-interview-warrior-brett-velicovich, Vox, 17 July 2017

“She had got up behind the chaise and her cloak had been caught by the wheel and was jammed in and it hung there. She was crying after it. Poor thing. Mr. Graham took her into the chaise and the cloak was released from the wheel but the child's misery did not cease for her cloak was torn to rags; it had been a miserable cloak before, but she had no other and it was the greatest sorrow that could befal her. Her name was Alice Fell.”

Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) English author, poet and diarist

February 16, 1802 This incident was the subject of Wordsworth's "Alice Fell" http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww190.html. Diaries

Cry

“Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Child Who Never Grew (1950)

Way, Knowledge, Help

“My friend returned to the gallery, looked once more at the adorable imprint of the most innocent, the most passionate of caresses. A mirror hung near by, where he could compare his present with his former face, the man he was with the man he had been. He never told me and I never asked what his feelings were at that moment. Did he feel that he was too culpable to have inspired a passion in a young girl whom he would have been a fool, almost a criminal, to marry? Did he comprehend that through his age which was so apparent, it was his youth which this child loved? Did he remember, with a keenness that was all too sad, that other, who had never given him a kiss like that at a time when he might have returned it? I only know that he left the same day, determined never again to see one whom he could no longer love as he had loved the other, with the hope, the purity, the soul of a man of twenty.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

Love, Youth, Age, Sadness

“When I was a small child, for some reason—and I don’t know if this was from cartoons or movies or what—I was very frightened of skeletons. I also was very afraid of the dark. I used to have incredibly terrible nightmares. I was afraid of everything as a child. Now look what I’m doing.”

Rich Koz (1952) American actor and comedian

Rich Koz http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/October-2017/Rich-Koz/ (October 27, 2017)

“In one variant, "On the day He created the heavens and the earth, Allah Almighty created a hundred mercies, each mercy equal to what is between the heaven and the earth, and He put one mercy on the earth by which a mother has compassion for her child and wild animals and birds for each other. On the Day of Rising, He will perfect them with this mercy."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 420
Sunni Hadith

Bird, Animals, Perfection

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 1 “A Parade in Ehrenrang” (p. 1; opening paragraph)

Truth, Imagination, Sea

“I am often astonished at well-meaning, spiritual people who advocate beaming light toward world leaders, who scold activists for expressing anger toward authorities or police, who define compassion as loving the enemy — but somehow lose sight of the need to love our friends, our allies, and those who suffer at the hands of the perpetrators. I really don't feel much call to beam love and light at Bush or Cheney or the directors of the International Monetary Fund. Whether or not they suffer from lack of love is beyond me. From my perspective, they suffer from an excess of power, and I feel called to take it away from them. Because I do love the child in Iraq, the woman in the favela, the eighteen-year-old recruit to the Marines who never dreamed he was signing up to bomb civilians. I can't love them, or myself and my community, effectively if I can't articulate the real differences in interests and agendas between "us" and "them"”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

between those who have too little social power and those who have too much.
Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Love, People, World, Dreams

““How are you on the high wire?”
“Wire walking? It’s simple. Any child of ten can do it—with about fourteen years practice.”

Michael Kurland book The Unicorn Girl

Source: The Unicorn Girl (1969), Chapter 8 (p. 117)

“Death did not come to my mother
Like an old friend.
She was a mother, and she must
Conceive him. Up and down the bed she fought crying
Help me, but death
Was a slow child
Heavy.”

Josephine Miles (1911–1985) American poet, academic

"Conception" (1974) st. 1–2; Collected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 1983

Death, Help, Cry

“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—’

That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down.”

Frederik Pohl book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 4 (p. 48)

Silence, Time

“But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse... The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.”

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

"Big Darkness" (22 July 2003)
2000s

Family, Fools, Failure, Future

“How do we tell them that one not be discouraged by the imperfection of the world and the inevitability of death and diminishment. How do we tell them when they lose a child, or are crippled, or know that they will themselves die too soon — that God permits pain and sickness and unfairness and evil to exist, only in order to permit us to test our mettle and to earn a fulfillment that would otherwise not be possible?”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Address at Iona College (1984)

Death, God, Pain, World

“What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world of the strong ties between parent and children, ties which an active personal relation from birth until death?… Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay for a specialization of emotions which might be bought about the other ways, notable through coeducation. And with such a question in our minds its interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes, the Electra complexes, and so on.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 147; Partly cited in: E. Michael Jones (1993) Degenerate Moderns: Modernity As Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior. p. 24-25

Death, Women, Men, Children

“I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.”

Susie Bright (1958) American writer and feminist

Sadness, Idea, Childhood

“Saw also a toy train big enough to pull children and a few adults. Would fain have had a ride on it, but I had no child with me, and feared that I might excite remark and even rebuke if I tried to pass myself off as a nursery-school type. The train had an excellent whistle which sent me, just as Sinatra sends the bobby-sockers. Whoo! it went, mellowly and invitingly: Whoo! Whoo!”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Children, Fear, School, Training

“He was a child, and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost-stories and German romances.”

Matthew Lewis (writer) (1775–1818) English novelist and dramatist

Walter Scott, manuscript note written in 1825; cited from J. G. Lockhart The Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1896) p. 81 col. 2.
Criticism

Imagination

“Human nature is said by many to be good; if so, where have social evils come from? For human nature is the only moral nature in that corrupting thing called "society." Every example set before the child of to-day is the fruit of human nature. It has been planted on every possible field — among the snows that never melt; in temperate regions, and under the line; in crowded cities, in lonely forests; in ancient seats of civilization, in new colonies; and in all these fields it has, without once failing, brought forth a crop of sins and troubles.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 191.

Nature, Evil

“My attitude toward life was also my attitude toward science. Jesus said one must be born again, must become as a little child. He must let no laziness, no fear, no stubbornness keep him from his duty. If he were born again he would see life from such a plane he would have the energy not to be impeded in his duty by these various sidetrackers and inhibitions. My work, my life, must be in the spirit of a little child seeking only to know the truth and follow it. My purpose alone must be God's purpose - to increase the welfare and happiness of His people. Nature will not permit a vacuum. It will be filled with something. Human need is really a great spiritual vacuum which God seeks to fill… With one hand in the hand of a fellow man in need and the other in the hand of Christ, He could get across the vacuum and I became an agent. Then the passage, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me," came to have real meaning. As I worked on projects which fulfilled a real human need forces were working through me which amazed me. I would often go to sleep with an apparently insoluble problem. When I woke the answer was there. Why, then, should we who believe in Christ be so surprised at what God can do with a willing man in a laboratory? Some things must be baffling to the critic who has never been born again.”

George Washington Carver (1864–1943) botanist

William J. Federer (2003), George Washington Carver: His Life & Faith in His Own Words http://books.google.es/books?id=Uyktcxy4MHkC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es#v=onepage&q&f=false, p. 68.

Life, God, Happiness, People

“When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter to London merchant Peter Collinson (9 May 1753); reported in Labaree: "Papers of Benjamin Franklin", vol 4, pp 481-482.
Epistles

Life, Men, Pain, Sex

“The universal jargon, in the sense explained above, is the same for the child and for the adult. It is the same for a Robinson Crusoe as for a human society. If Robinson wants to join what is in a protocol of yesterday with what is in his protocol today, that is, if he wants to make use of language at all, he must make use of the ‘intersubjective’ language. The Robinson of yesterday and the Robinson of today stand precisely in the same relation in which Robinson stands to Friday.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: 1930s, "Protocol Statements" (1932), p. 96

Sense, Universe

“Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Earth, Act I, l. 191
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Men, Dead

“If a child has an older sibling involved in an addiction, there is a 90 percent chance that he or she will get involved too.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton in: Denise Lang (1992). How to Stop Your Relatives from Driving You Crazy: Strategies for coping with 'Challenging' Relatives. Fireside, NY, NY, pg 181.
Recruiting Siblings into Treatment

Chance, Siblings

“I would be happy to have a gay child. He would be a Boy Scout, and he would teach all the other Boy Scouts how to build a fire with two sticks and a back-handed compliment.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Tours and CDs, Revolution Tour

Happiness, Boy, Scouting

“Traditionalists value hierarchy. An infantile, immoral society deifies The Child. Kids should follow Florence King's injunction that "children have no business expressing opinions on anything except, 'Do you have enough room in the toes?'”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

2010s, 2016

Children, Business

“The melodic curves of speech are an expression of the complete organism and of all phases of its spiritual activities. They demonstrate whether a man is stupid or intelligent, sleepy or awake, tired or alert. They tell us whether he is a child or an old man, whether it is morning or evening, light or darkness, heat or frost, and disclose whether a person is alone or in company. The art of dramatic writing is to compose a melodic curve that will, as if by magic, reveal immediately a human being in one definite phase of his existence.”

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) Czech composer

Leoš Janáček: Letters and Reminiscences (Stedron, Bohumir, ed. Translated by Geraldine Thomsen. Prague: Artia, 1995).

Stupidity, Art, Intelligence, Light

“People can’t eat our pity, dehydrated children can’t drink our sorrow nor can a child be educated by our anger at injustice. No one has ever been lifted out of poverty by us being overwhelmed or shocked. The only thing that ends poverty is our actions.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

Lecture on Global Health

Children, People, Education, Drink

“My grandfather, a teacher of religion, could think of nothing better than to place my father – his eldest son, still a child – as a clerk with a firm of herring wholesalers, and his youngest son with a barber. No, my father was not a clerk, but, for thirty-two years, a plain workman [in the Jewish ghetto of Vitebsk ]. He lifted heavy barrels, and my heart used to twist like a Turkish pretzel as I watched him carrying those loads and stirring the little herrings with his frozen hands... Sometimes my father's clothes would glisten with herring brine. The light played above him, besides him. But his face, now yellow, now clear, would sometimes break into a wan smile.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 23
1920's, My life (1922)

Religion, Smile, Thinking, Light

“The dynamo of your smile caressed a barefoot virgin child to wander.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Beside You
Song lyrics, Astral Weeks (1969)

Smile

“Pale, cold torchlight.
Slender shadows from a row of tall bamboo
Flicker dimly on the coffin of a child
Carried through the chilling dew.
A sobbing old woman lays bare her heart.
I stare at the countless stars in silence, asking myself:
Since when has my soul been destroyed?
And might that dark coffin of a child
Not contain my corpse as well?
Vaguely, from the immensity of space,
I heard a star cast a soft reply.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"The Funeral Procession", as quoted in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), p. 164

Soul, Star, Silence, Heart

“I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities. But the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as "The Boneless Wonder." My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

A jibe at Prime Minister (and First Lord of the Treasury) Ramsay MacDonald during a speech in the House of Commons, January 28, 1931 "Trade Disputes and Trade Unions (Amendment) Bill" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1931/jan/28/trade-disputes-and-trade-unions-1#column_1021. The 1930s

Youth, Parent, Waiting

Quotes about child page 23

Quotes about child
page 23