quotations about children
In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.
BILL COSBY
Fatherhood
The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
Alligators have the right idea ... they eat their young.
IDA CORWIN
Mildred Pierce
A state, a community, caring first for all its children, providing amply for their spiritual as for their temporal well-being, has organized the primitive Eden.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature.
WALT DISNEY
Deeds Rather Than Words
Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Families with babies, and families without babies, are so sorry for each other.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Boys have a period of mischief as much as they have measles or chicken-pox.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We know not what the child may become.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
Some people never learn how to talk to kids. They turn up the volume and enunciate with extra care, as if talking to a partially deaf immigrant. They sound as if they're reading lines somebody else wrote for them, or as if what they're saying is really for the benefit of other adults listening and not just for the child. Kids sense that and turn off.
F. PAUL WILSON
The Tomb
Setting a good example for your children does nothing but increase their embarrassment.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, Quotable Quotes: Wit and Wisdom from the Greatest Minds of Our Time
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
ADRIENNE RICH
Of Woman Born
Everyone should have kids. They are the greatest joy in the world. But they are also terrorists. You'll realize this as soon as they're born, and they start using sleep deprivation to break you.
RAY ROMANO
stand-up routine
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Nothing you do for a child is ever wasted.
GARRISON KEILLOR
Leaving Home
Children see magic because they look for it.
CHRISTOPHER MOORE
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
When people talk about wanting to "have children someday," what they really mean is that they want babies. Nobody wants an angry adolescent. Nobody wants an obnoxious seven-year-old trying to wear out dirty words they just learned in school that day. What they really want is cute, adorable babies who love you and need you. The bad stuff is just the price you agree to pay for having the good stuff.
PAUL REISER
Babyhood
We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do.
BRIGHAM YOUNG
Journal of Discourses
My friends with children say it's the quality of love that is so unique, the fact that you surrender yourself to love, and through that surrendering become transparent to your deepest feelings. Perhaps it's not having a child that is so striking, but that unconditional love, joy, happiness exist and finally, through the child, have a chance to be expressed. To finally, irrevocably love without holding anything back. Perhaps the magic--the love, happiness, fulfillment--existed in us all along like an underground river, but we could never see it or know it because we kept looking for it outside, in accomplishments, body sizes, and other people.
GENEEN ROTH
Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment