c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive, shameful and deserved senescence of bachelors, of all those for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must be longer than for other men, since for them it is a void of promise, and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent partition among offspring.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
I walk the beach to smile at other peopleand their busy children, trying to findanother way to save the world.
— Thomas Dukes, Baptist Confidential
Children are not chattel. they cannot be given away or traded in the marketplace.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Things had improved after he was born. We both loved him with such fervor that it was impossible that some wouldn’t splash back on us.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Of Christmas Present
I have never tried to walk through a mall in the Christmas season dressed like a jolly old elf. You might as well dress up like a pork chop and walk into an alley full of starving dogs.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Of Christmas Present
Half of the time, the Holy Ghost tries to warn us about certain people that come into our life. The other half of the time he tries to tell us that the sick feeling we get in a situation is not the other person’s fault, rather it is our own hang-ups. A life filled with bias, hatred, judgment, insecurity, fear, delusion and self-righteousness can cloud the soul of anyone you meet. Our job is never to assume,instead it is to listen, communicate, ask questions then ask more, until we know the true depth of someone’s spirit.
— Shannon L. Alder
For Every Child We Teach To Cherish Learning, A Universe Is Born.
— D. Simone
If the bible be true, God commanded his chosen people to destroy men simply for the crime of defending their native land. They were not allowed to spare trembling and white-haired age, nor dimpled babes clasped in the mothers' arms. They were ordered to kill women, and to pierce, with the sword of war, the unborn child. 'Our heavenly Father' commanded the Hebrews to kill the men and women, the fathers, sons and brothers, but to preserve the girls alive. Why were not the maidens also killed? Why were they spared? Read the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, and you will find that the maidens were given to the soldiers and the priests. Is there, in all the history of war, a more infamous thing than this? Is it possible that God permitted the violets of modesty, that grow and shed their perfume in the maiden's heart, to be trampled beneath the brutal feet of lust? If this was the order of God, what, under the same circumstances, would have been the command of a devil? When, in this age of the world, a woman, a wife, a mother, reads this record, she should, with scorn and loathing, throw the book away. A general, who now should make such an order, giving over to massacre and rapine a conquered people, would be held in execration by the whole civilized world. Yet, if the bible be true, the supreme and infinite God was once a savage.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
Secure attachment has been linked to a child's ability to successfully recover and prove resilient in the presence of a traumatic event.
— Asa Don Brown, The effects of childhood trauma on adult perception and worldview
Children have their own kind of power. When you're teaching them, protecting them, you are more than you thought you could be. More understanding, more patient, more capable, more wise.
— Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty
It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play'd be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.
— John Cage, M: Writings '67-'72
Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don't ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?
— John Cage, M: Writings '67-'72
The soul of a child is the loveliest flower that grows in the garden of God.
— Elizabeth George, A Mom After God's Own Heart: 10 Ways to Love Your Children
It's been said that parents should give their children roots and wings. That was a perfect description of my parents. Even in a wheelchair, my father was a dreamer with his head in the clouds and my mother was the roots with both feet planted firmly on terra quaking firma.
— Richard Paul Evans, Grace
Adoption is the most intentional process on Earth.
— Jody Cantrell Dyer, The Eye of Adoption: The True Story of My Turbulent Wait for a Baby
Magrat liked to think she was good with children, and worried that she wasn’t. She didn’t like them very much, and worried about this too. Nanny Ogg seemed to be effortlessly good with children by alternately and randomly giving them either a sweet or a thick ear, while Granny Weatherwax ignored them for most of the time and that seemed to work just as well.
— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
No matter what you do each day...or in life...doing things God's way is a matter of the heart.
— Elizabeth George, A Mom After God's Own Heart: 10 Ways to Love Your Children
Even if Mary gives birth to a child who is not her husband's, if she has a shining pride, they become a holy mother and child.
— Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun
Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice.
— Michael   Lewis, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood
Mum bought me �kite for my sixth birthday. It was beautiful. Snowy white with � long tail of ribbons. Sheheld the string, and I� ran and ran as fast as I �could, but it kept dropping to� clumsy heap on the ground. When� I gottired Mum took over, holding it high above her head and running and running until, all at once, �sudden wonderful gust of wind took the kite soaring high, high into the sky, so� I had to squint to see it.“Hold on, Rosie!” Mum had called. “Hold tight!” And �I did, gripping the string with all my might as the kite danced high up above, gleaming bright whiteagainst the blue sky, its ribbons sparkling in the sunlight as it flew, soaring and dipping like �bird, forever pulling at the string in my hand —higher, higher — tugging to getfree. Then� I let go.The string snapped from my grip and was gone. Mum raced after it,but it was too fast,soaring up,up and away, higher than the trees. She scooped me up in �hug and told me it was all right, she'd buy me another one. But� I didn't want another one. That was my kite,andit was free. I’d let it go.It’d wanted so much to be free that I just couldn't hold on, couldn’t hold it down.� I smiled as I� watched it whirl away — above the trees, above the birds, above the clouds, sparkling into the heavens, dancing free. It was the most beautiful thing I �have ever seen.
— Katie Dale, Someone Else's Life
There's poverty in wealth. If a man is wealthy without good health, is he not poor? If a man is wealthy without children, is he not poor? If a man is wealthy without God, is he not poor? If a man is wealthy without giving alms, is he not poor? If a man is wealthy without wisdom, is he not poor? Then there's a great lack in riches.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
First you be a hero and then raise your child to be a hero.
— Amit Kalantri
God speaks of his children shining best in ways that only he can provide. The heavens lift one as a golden child while the flesh lowers one to a child with gold.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.
— Joan Didion
People tend to raise the child inside of them rather than the child in front of them.
— Joe Newman, Raising Lions
Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You're my ideal reader, friend, partner. I'm your fan.
— Brook Tesla, iPooKee
I had uncovered a widely held but overlooked attachment: our attachment to the view that every problem must have a solution. We delude ourselves that we can think our way out of a problem or we see it as a matter of finding the right person to advise us. We become beggars for our problems, asking numerous people for an opinion. So often, we refuse to relax until a problem is fixed, only to discover our inability to relax was most of the problem.
— Sarah Napthali, Buddhism for Mothers of Young Children: Becoming a Mindful Parent
Our wives, our families, and our churches need godly men who have discernment--discernment to deal with life and life-issues on a spiritual level.
— Jim George, A Husband After God's Own Heart
...as we are endowed. ...with rhetorics. ...none will deny. ...of innocence. ...towards scribbling. ...of love lines. ...and of lust. ...to what seems like male. ...to what seems like female. ...in those days. ...I mean nothing. ...but in high school.....even me. ...I can't deny.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Say what you will, dear sister, we do what we do for the promise of our youth. Yet it is always they who scar beneath the points of daggers.
— Chris Galford, At Faith's End
Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.
— Susan Hill, The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year
If shadows were caused by the interplay between light and Life, a child's was still forming. An adult's was inextricably bound to his body, but a child had a tenuous relationship to his own permanence, and thus, his own shadow.
— Anne Ursu, The Shadow Thieves
When i was a child, i liked tasting any candy i happened to see, but as i grew older, i realized those are a great meal to the worms in my innards. Will you shun old habits or nay? That's the question.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Behold the Power of the peanut. His body mass may be small, but his influence is mighty. The last holdout in the Tower has officially fallen to him. (Said by Pia about the effect her son 'peanut' had on the Sentinel Aryal)
— Thea Harrison, Kinked
The simplest toy, one which even the youngest child can operate, is called a grandparent.
— Sam Levenson
When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Occasionally, a dog will be presented as some training method for having a baby. "My girlfriend and I got a dog. We are going to see if we can handle that before we have kids." This is a little like testing the waters of being a vegetarian by having lettuce on your burger. Okay, maybe that metaphor doesn't make sense, but neither does using a dog as a training method for having a baby.
— Jim Gaffigan, Dad Is Fat
The toddler started making this whine/moan noise while pawing at Tabitha. I know as a woman I'm supposed to have this innate love of babies, but the truth is, they kind of remind me of zombies. They stumble around, arms out, moaning. And if they get a hold of you, they suck the energy out of you.
— Cindi Madsen, Cinderella Screwed Me Over
What do you do,' said Jean, 'with, ah, "ungifted" children when you have them?''Cherish them and raise them, you imbecile. Most of them end up working for us, in Karthain and elsewhere. What did you think we'd do, burn them on a pyre?''Forget I asked
— Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves
If a fourteen year-old can deliver your message, it's not because he's gifted. It's because intellectually, you're a child.
— Bill Maher
[There are] games children must conjure up to combat an awful fact of childhood: the fact of their vulnerability to fear, anger, hate and frustration - all the emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives and that they can perceive only as as ungovernable and dangerous forces. To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction.
— Maurice Sendak
so that it isn't upsetting to anybody. It's something we've always known about fairy tales – they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, who throw their children out. They tell things about life which children know instinctively, and the pleasure and relief lie in finding these things expressed in language that children can live with. You can't eradicate these feelings – they exist and they're a great source of creative inspiration.
— Maurice Sendak
Of course the reason that all the children in our town like Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is because Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle likes children, she enjoys talking to them and best of all they do not irritate her.
— Betty MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic
Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master?
— George Eliot, Silas Marner
Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.
— Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
It’s said that sport is the civilised society’s substitute for war, and also that the games we play as children are designed to prepare us for the realities of adult life. Certainly it’s true that my brother thrived in the capitalist kindergarten of the Monopoly board, developing a set of ruthless strategies whose success is reflected in his bank balance even to this day. I, on the other hand, can still be undone by the kind of ridiculous sentimentality that would see me sacrifice anything, anything, in order to have the three matching red-headed cards of Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square and The Strand sitting tidily together on my side of the board.
— Danielle Wood, Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls
There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.The reason for that is that in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship.But stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "events never grow stale." There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. And by a story I mean not only Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk but also the great novels of the nineteenth century, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Bleak House and many others: novels where the story is at the center of the writer's attention, where the plot actually matters. The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.But what characterizes the best of children's authors is that they're not embarrassed to tell stories. They know how important stories are, and they know, too, that if you start telling a story you've got to carry on till you get to the end. And you can't provide two ends, either, and invite the reader to choose between them. Or as in a highly praised recent adult novel I'm about to stop reading, three different beginnings. In a book for children you can't put the plot on hold while you cut artistic capers for the amusement of your sophisticated readers, because, thank God, your readers are not sophisticated. They've got more important things in mind than your dazzling skill with wordplay. They want to know what happens next.
— Philip Pullman
We're constantly judging and grading other parents, just to make sure that they aren't any better than us. I'm as guilty as anyone. I see some lady hand her kid a Nintendo DS at the supermarket and I instantly downgrade that lady to Shitty Parent status. I feel pressure to live up to a parental ideal that no one probably has ever achieved. I feel pressure to raise a group of human beings that will help America kick the shit out of Finland and South Korea in the world math rankings. I feel pressure to shield my kids from the trillion pages of hentai donkey porn out there on the Internet. I feel pressure to make the insane amounts of money needed for a supposedly 'middle-class' upbringing for the kids, an upbringing that includes a house and college tuition and health care and so many other expenses that you have to be a multimillionaire to afford it. PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE.
— Drew Magary, Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood
Children and journalists need what they don't need actually.
— Raheel Farooq
You’re saying, “What the hell am I gonna do with her?” You’re saying, “Shit, did she take her pills?” You’re saying, “Once upon a time, I used to have a little girl.
— Shannon Celebi, After Spring Comes
You won't get love from a child if you don't give love.
— P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
When Molly O'Toole was looking at the colored pictures in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's big dictionary and just happened to be eating a candy cane at the same time and drooled candy cane juice on the colored pictures of gems and then forgot and shut the book so the pages all stuck together, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle didn't say, "Such a careless little girl can never ever look at the colored pictures in my dictionary again." Nor did she say, "You must never look at books when you are eating." She said, "Let's see, I think we can steam those pages apart, and then we can wipe the stickiness off with a little soap and water, like this-now see, it's just as good as new. There's nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.
— Betty MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic
Zehrunisa didn’t know Abdul’s age herself. Seventeen was what she’d said before the burning, when people asked her, but he could have been twenty-seven, for all she knew. You didn’t keep track of a child’s years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young.
— Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
She was very ugly - the ugliest person you ever saw in your life! Her hair was scraped into a bun, sticking straight out at the back of her head like a teapot handle; and her face was round and wrinkly, and she had eyes like two little black boot-buttons. And her nose! - she had a nose like two potatoes. She wore a rusty black dress right up to the top of her neck and right down to her button boots, and a rusty black jacket and a rusty black bonnet, all trimmed with trembly black jet, with her teapot-handled of a bun sticky out at the back. And she carried a small brown case and a large black stick, and she had a very fierce expression indeed on her wrinkly, round, brown face. But what you noticed most of all was that she had one huge front Tooth, sticking right out like a tombstone over her lower lip. You never, in the whole of your life, ever saw such a Tooth!
— Christianna Brand, Nurse Matilda
My demons creep like a pedo in a park full of kids. Each one reminding me of the consequences, what I didn’t do, or did.
— Ken Dereste Dorcely, Life Tone Changed
Tell your children the most important things To Be when they grow up, is to be kind and compassionate, to be loving and grateful, and to be happy and at peace with who they are, no matter of what they chose to do when they grow up.
— Martin Suarez
Good evening, children,' Said Nurse Matilda, and she gave a loud thump on the floor with her big black stick. 'I am Nurse Matilda.
— Christianna Brand, Nurse Matilda
Philosophically, I am a logical empiricist and materialist, and I am a veteran of over 400 radio and TV interviews and debates. I am a Christ-myth advocate and am pursuing research into how Christianity could have begun without a historical Jesus of Nazareth. I am married with one daughter and three grandchildren.
— Frank R. Zindler
You were always an annoyingly holy child, Frankie. What the hell was wrong with you?
— Lisa Dekis, Frankie's Angel: A Child's Tale of Loss and Recovery
Appeals to the Young and the Young at Heart.
— Jodie McCallum, A Child's Book of Manners
Small children are capable of great love. Love that overwhelms. Love that changes small worlds completely. Dangerous feelings that blot out everything.
— Missy Anne, Jimmy James Blood
The world (including Drapervilleh is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances. They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours of the day. At what moment, from what hiding-place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling. And when it does, the result is not always disastrous. Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives. Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure. You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their foreheads after a fall.
— William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It
The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.
— Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook
Shall I tell her? Shall I be a kind and merciful narrator and take our girl aside? Shall I touch her new, red heart and make her understand that she is no longer one of the tribe of heartless children, nor even the owner of the wild and infant heart of thirteen-year-old girls and boys? Oh, September! Hearts, once you have them locked up in your chest, are a fantastic heap of tender and terrible wonders - but they must be trained. Beatrice could have told her all about it. A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarm, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. Shall I give fair warning, as neither you nor I was given?
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect
— Werner Herzog
We are all born rude. No infant has ever appeared yet with the grace to understand how inconsiderate it is to disturb others in the middle of the night.
— Judith Martin, Common Courtesy: In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problem That Baffled Mr. Jefferson
The world was beautiful when looked at in this way—without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Singing with children in the schools has been the most rewarding experience of my life.
— Pete Seeger
Good parents use the mistakes they did in the past when they were young to advice the children God gave to them to prevent them from repeating those mistakes again. However, bad parents always want to be seen as right and appear "angelic and saintly" as if they never had horrible youth days.
— Israelmore Ayivor
A lot of people believe that mental illness does not affect our children within the school system. But the truth is that a lot of bullying stems from untreated or poorly treated mental and behavioral health problems.
— Tamara  Hill, Mental Health In A Failed American System: What Every Parent, Family, & Caregiver Should Know
We first become salesmen as children in the confession booths of our parents.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
As far as I can tell, it doesn't make any difference to adults how clever children are. They always stick together. Unless you are sick or dying or mortally wounded, they will always side with the other adult.
— R.L. LaFevers, Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos
No child ever became ‘good’ by being told that she or he was bad or by beating her/him.
— Maddy Malhotra, How to Build Self-Esteem and Be Confident: Overcome Fears, Break Habits, Be Successful and Happy
The best security blanket a child can have is parents who respect each other.
— Jan Blaustone
Nick and the CandlestickI am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactitesDrip and thicken, tearsThe earthen wombExudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airsWrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides.They weld to me like plums.Old cave of calcium Icicles, old echoer.Even the newts are white,Those holy Joes.And the fish, the fish ----Christ! they are panes of ice,A vice of knives, A piranha Religion, drinkingIts first communion out of my live toes. The candleGulps and recovers its small altitude,Its yellows hearten.O love, how did you get here? O embryoRemembering, even in sleep, Your crossed position. The blood blooms cleanIn you, ruby. The painYou wake to is not yours.Love, love,I have hung our cave with roses, With soft rugs ----The last of Victoriana. Let the starsPlummet to their dark address,Let the mercuric Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well,You are the oneSolid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.
— Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Let’s appreciate and welcome the arrival of a new prophet The one who can be Reasonable and rational Realistic and democratThe one who respects the rights of women and childrenAnd does not make everyone slave of his nationLet’s do not whip some virgin pregnant womenThey may have Christ in their belly Let’s arrange a new miracle That can be little rationale and less awkward Maybe an application (software) or a gadget That can make us smile Or let’s build a green park that children could play and be happy And let’s bring a little educated prophetNot like the old one Illiterate! Marrying 10 to 12 women and waging warMaybe someone who does not blind the world by his Eye to eye policy and manifestation A little kind and a little rational
— M.F. Moonzajer
So many parents think they always need to teach their children about life, when in fact, if they listened once in a while, they would learn from their kids what life is truly about.
— Martin R. Lemieux
Every time that God gives us a child, it's His way of saying He trusts us-trusts us to offer love and to guide the child toward Him.
— Tricia Goyer, A Christmas Gift for Rose
Betty had forgotten how you only get slivers of stories from children - usually what they echo from overheard adult conversations.
— Molly Ringwald, When it Happens to You
Children are prophets of nature.
— Raheel Farooq
The greatest legacy a father can leave for his children before he departs is PEACE, otherwise his properties will go in PIECES sooner that he dies.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Meditation is doing what you are doing - whether you are doing formal meditation or child care.
— Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong
I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.
— Arthur Kornberg
TV news is like kryptonite to children. The two major shifts in taste for children to adulthood are news and mustard. Kids hate news and mustard. Well, mustard even has the word 'turd' in it. Maybe I should threaten my kids that if they don't go to bed, I will force them to watch an hour-long newscast about mustard.
— Jim Gaffigan, Dad Is Fat
Children and cats are the best machines of fun!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Make no mistake, every child has his own light, no matter how difficult or defiant or unlikeable he or she might seem.
— Nancy Rose, Raise the Child You've Got—Not the One You Want
We're assigned to children who are doomed.
— Lisa Dekis, Frankie's Angel: A Child's Tale of Loss and Recovery
Would my son love me, when he was old enough to know what love meant?p 181
— Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife
Once upon a time there was a huge family of children; and they were terribly, terribly naughty.
— Christianna Brand, Nurse Matilda
The Agency was doubtful, because they had already sent a lot of nurses and nannies and governesses to Mr. and Mrs. Brown's family. 'The person you want,' they said, 'is Nurse Matilda.
— Christianna Brand, Nurse Matilda
And as they spoke - lo and behold! - there was a knock at the door, and there stood a small, stout figure dressed in rusty black; and she said, 'Good evening, Mr and Mrs Brown, I am Nurse Matilda.
— Christianna Brand, Nurse Matilda
A child is the quickest to trust because they have no concept of the depravity of our species.
— Alessandra Torre, The Girl in 6E
Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.
— Betsy Hearne
But, Dad…” She hesitated. “It will mean raising me all over again. It means suffering through my childhood for a third time. No parent should be asked to do that.”Sol managed a smile. “No parent would refuse that, Rachel.
— Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion
I don't know as much about children as I would like to. I am godmother to a wonderful three-year-old boy named dominic, the son of my friend Sophie. They live in Scotland, near Oban, and I don't get to see him often. I am always astonished, when I do, at his increasing personhood - no sooner had I gotten used to carrying about a warm lump of baby that he stopped being one started scurrying around on his own. I missed six months, and lo and behold, he learned how to talk! Now he talks to himself, which I find terribly endearing since I do, too.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
— Sigmund Freud
He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
The future of my child is unknown but I have loved him, supported him, and taught him right from wrong. I will continue to do so...
— Brenda Lochinger
The hurt that troubled children create is never greater than the hurt they feel.
— L. Tobin
I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.
— Paul Kropp, How to Make Your Child a Reader for Life
But wasn't there some sort of rule that said parents had to be smarter than their kids? It didn't seem fair.
— Ruta Sepetys, Out of the Easy
The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.
— Charles Dickens
They were blessed, said Jane; they were going to give birth to themselves. It would be themselves they gave birth to, only better. That was why she and Della must work so hard to protect them, their children. In protecting the children Jane and Della would also (Jane explained this over and over again) save themselves—
— Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist
A successful father is not more successful than his children.
— Raheel Farooq
Yesterday, Amelia and Kit came over for supper, and we took a blanket down to the beach afterward to watch the moon rise. Kit loves to do that, but she always falls asleep before it is fully rise, and I carry her home to Amelia's house. She is certain she'll be able to stay awake all night as soon as she's five.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
When coming to making kids: Size doesn’t count, it’s sperm count that counts.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
And here is my sweet little Annamaria,’ she added, tenderly caressing a little girl of three years old, who had not made a noise for the last two minutes; ‘And she is always so gentle and quiet—Never was there such a quiet little thing!’ But unfortunately in bestowing these embraces, a pin in her ladyship’s head dress slightly scratching the child’s neck, produced from this pattern of gentleness such violent screams, as could hardly be outdone by any creature professedly noisy. The mother’s consternation was excessive; but it could not surpass the alarm of the Miss Steeles, and every thing was done by all three, in so critical an emergency, which affection could suggest as likely to assuage the agonies of the little sufferer. She was seated in her mother’s lap, covered with kisses, her wound bathed with lavender-water, by one of the Miss Steeles, who was on her knees to attend her, and her mouth stuffed with sugar plums by the other. With such a reward for her tears, the child was too wise to cease crying.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
We call them grunters. They're ghost hunters but grunters is more appropriate because most of them are pigs.
— Wendy Milton, Angel of Fire
...it struck her, this was tragedy-- not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Life is not how we lead it. It is how children are born to lead it.
— Raheel Farooq
Motherhood:The most exhausting, emotional, rewardingand life-enhancing journey a woman can take.
— Charlotte  Pearson, Mummy Fever: Mission Accomplished
For a time Emerson politely endeavored to conceal his boredom - like most men, he is profoundly disinterested in all children except his own - ...
— Elizabeth Peters, The Falcon at the Portal
To raise a child is to submit to a staggering amount of work, much of which is deeply unpleasant. It would be crazy to have children if they weren't so damned important.
— Jonathan V. Last, What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster
A street where there are no children playing is a dead street!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In order for them to be the best they can be, my children need me to be the best version of me I can be. That meanstaking charge of our lives, being strong even if I don’t feel it,being brave and believing that I can make things better.
— Charlotte  Pearson, Mummy Fever: Mission Accomplished
I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.
— Lewis F. Powell Jr.
Dating a wo/man with a kid is the new adoption.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
Tell me,' the man leans forward ans says, 'have you heard of a lady called Madeleine? No? In 1996, this lady named Albright Madeleine, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on television how she felt about the fact that five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions? Do you know what she said? She said that it was "a very hard choice" but "we think the price is worth it". These are her exact words. How do you feel about that?'How do you think I feel about that? And I would take your love for children more seriously if you didn't have children cleaning your floors.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden
You need a husband and some babies to look after. Otherwise you're going to grow up into a virago...
— Lindsay Armstrong, Spitfire
How great inexperience and innocence is. On the authority of their parents they go to a place where they could meet their death; for the Zirder in flood is very dangerous and, given the ignorance of the children, can be incalculably dangerous. But they know nothing of death. Even if they speak its name, they do not know its essence and their aspiring life has no feeling for annihilation. If they were on the brink of death themselves, they would not know it and they would die before they found it out.
— Adalbert Stifter, Brigitta, with Abdias, Limestone & the Forest Path
For gypsies do not like to stay -They only come to go away.
— Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline and the Gypsies
Children must be taught that they are worth being heard, being saved and being loved.
— C. JoyBell C.
Never tell a child that something it’s too hard
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children.
— A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book
There are really places in your heart that you don't know exist until you love a child.
— Anne Lamott
Christians are famous for telling people to be "child-like" and yet one of the greatest qualities of a child (the never ending list of questions) is often discouraged.
— D.R. Silva, It's All About Jesus: What They Never Told You in Church
Most parents are not really ‘supportive’ because they want their kid(s) to succeed; they ‘support’ their kid(s) as an attempt to avoid appearing to have bred a failure, or, failures … in the eyes of their peers and/or neighbours.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Children take joy in their work and sometimes as adults we forget that's something we should continue doing.
— Ashley Ormon, God in Your Morning
There's no single effort more radical in it's potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.
— Marianne Williamson
Papas should be loving their children so much that they cry when they gone. That’s what papas is supposed to do.
— Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run
Dating a wo/man with a child is adoption … without the paperwork.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We must return to optimism in our parenting. To focus on the joys, not the hassles; the love, not the disappointments; the common sense, not the complexities.
— Fred G. Gosman
To know what should be going on in a household: spend a few minutes with the wife, or, the husband. To know what’s really going on: spend a few minutes with their kid(s).
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Do whatever you must do to protect your children and wife.
— Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run
Men marry for the womb. Women marry for their tummy.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Raising kids is part joy and part guerrilla warfare.
— Ed Asner
Stories of her children when they were small, their round little bodies barely containing their personalities, which bloomed and glittered and melted into her.
— Erica Bauermeister, The Lost Art of Mixing
A ‘white’ kid that asks too many questions is called *curious.* A ‘black’ kid that asks too many questions is called *forward.*
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
What if the actual sin was that despite the fact of knowing how cruel and unfair this world is
—  we still bring children to life?
What would it profit us to possess and perform everything else and be like pure saints, if we meanwhile neglected our chief purpose in life, namely, the care of the young?
— Martin Luther
It was interesting. Isabelle thought, the children that chose you. Some come through your body; others came in cars in the middle of the night.
— Erica Bauermeister, The Lost Art of Mixing
There would be times in the years to come when he ( Murphy ) would accompany me back and forth between the two worlds I'd come to know. Other times, Yipes would venture out over the water, and even Matilda came along once. There were loads of clothes and seeds and jars of honey and other such things cramping our space, and children of every age moving between the pillars and The Land of Elyon. And always, always, there was Marco at the pedals, helping guide the way across the Lonely Sea. I have yet to venture off the course that was set for me by Sir Alistair Wakefield, but I see certain things on the old maps that make me curious. Are there other places to explore, somewhere in the immeasurable reaches of the Lonely Sea? Maybe my own children or their children will find these strange spots on the map. My way is set an in stone, and I don't feel the need to veer off any longer. It has taken many days of searching and fighting, but in the end I have found what I was looking for. I have found my way home.
— Patrick Carman, Stargazer
I wonder if a fish'sOne and only wish isThat other fish will never say,"This fish is sure delicious!
— Brian Rock, Don't Play with Your Food!
I am told many children block out the memory of trauma. In fact, the healing process can only truly begin when we are willing to remember.
— Phoebe Stone, The Boy on Cinnamon Street
He says that we must protect our families no matter what. No matter what we got to do to protect them.
— Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run
Being a 'good' parent is more about the parent, and, less about the 'supposedly-could-have-been-bad' child.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Mamas are always crying about how one day they see you as a baby, and the next morning, they see you growed up.
— Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run
Single moms: You are a doctor, a teacher, a nurse, a maid, a cook, a referee, a heroine, a provider, a defender, a protector, a true Superwoman. Wear your cape proudly.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach—it is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.
— Sydney J. Harris
I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Every book is a children's book if the kid can read!
— Mitch Hedberg
Religion- made by men to rule women, children and idiots!
— Vardan Hambardzumyan
Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.
— Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
There passed a child of four, a small girl on a footpath over the fields, going home in the evening to Erl. They looked at each other with round eyes."Hullo," said the child."Hullo, child of men," said the troll.. . . "What are you?" said the child."A troll of Elfland," answered the troll. "So I thought," said the child."Where are you going, child of men?" the troll asked."To the houses," the child replied."We don't want to go there," said the troll."N-no," said the child."Come to Elfland," the troll said.The child thought for a while. Other children had gone, and the elves always sent a changeling in their place, so that nobody quite missed them and nobody really knew. She thought awhile of the wonder and wildness of Elfland, and then of her own house."N-no," said the child."Why not?" said the troll."Mother made a jam roll this morning," said the child. And she walked on gravely home. Had it not been for that chance jam roll she had gone to Elfland."Jam!" said the troll contemptuously and thought of the tarns of Elfland, the great lily-leaves lying flat upon their solemn waters, the huge blue lilies towering into the elf-light above the green deep tarns: for jam this child had forsaken them!
— Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter
What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.
— Sydney J. Harris, Best of Sydney Harris
From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things you told him to say. He's been listening to somebody else tell him what to do... He hasn't changed. He is still listening to somebody else tell him what to do. The problem is, it isn't you any,ore; it's his peers.
— Barbara Coloroso, Kids Are Worth It!: Giving Your Child the Gift of Inner Discipline
But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Sometimes I wonder if I'm nothing more than the sum of who [my parents] were. Even worse, I worry that I don't add up nearly so well, that I'm just a shadowed reflection of them. Now that question hounds me a lot more often than I like to admit.
— Cooper Davis, Taking you Home
Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.
— Marilyn Jager Adams
Girls mature faster than boys, cost more to raise, and statistics show that the old saw about girls not knowing about money and figures is a myth. Girls start to outspend boys before puberty—and they manage to maintain this lead until death or an ugly credit manager, whichever comes first. Males are born with a closed fist. Girls are born with the left hand cramped in a position the size of an American Express card. Whenever a girl sees a sign reading, “Sale, Going Out of Business, Liquidation,” saliva begins to form in her mouth, the palms of her hands perspire and the pituitary gland says, “Go, Mama.” In the male, it is quite a different story. He has a gland that follows a muscle from the right arm down to the base of his billfold pocket. It's called “cheap.” Girls can slam a door louder, beg longer, turn tears on and off like a faucet, and invented the term, “You don't trust me.” So much for “sugar and spice and everything nice” and “snips and snails and puppydog tails.
— Erma Bombeck, Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession
And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachment to his parents; only when we allow his independence can he then freely offer us love and respect, without conflict and without resentment. It is the hardest lesson to learn that the goal of parenthood is not to reign forever but to abdicate gracefully at the right time.
— Sydney J. Harris, Best of Sydney Harris
And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.
— Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris