c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud....
— Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century
Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do -- you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.
— Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home
That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. Iwas weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. Morescientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But aharsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could notremain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
It takes a female to have a baby,It takes a woman to raise a child,It takes a mother to raise them correctly,It takes a warrior to show them how to change the world.
— Shannon L. Alder
Why haven't I got a husband and children?" mused Greta Garbo to the Dutchess of Windsor, "I never met a man I could marry.
— Greta Garbo
I'm planting a tree to teach me to gather strength from my deepest roots.
— Andrea Koehle Jones, The Wish Trees
Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.
— Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
We pretend that we know our children, because it's easier than admitting the truth--from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers. It's far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it's safer to say you're a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you.
— Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart
On this Mother's Day and every day before and after, I thank you God for the precious gift of my three children. I love them unconditionally.
— Ana Monnar
Not fault of teaching spider if little spider pay more attention to catching fly than doing lesson.
— Anne Bishop, Queen of the Darkness
Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Rant
You can overcome whatever is going on around you if you believe in the light that lives within you.
— Justine Edward, Shine
Im's offspring stare at stars and make clocks that calculate useless happenings like the angle of a hawk's claws as it strikes its prey. They demonstrate their contraptions and everyone marvels. My children get drunk, confuse a herd of cows with an enemy regiment, and slaughter the lot, screaming like lunatics until the entire army panics.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Bleeds
I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant - children so seldom know what is good for them - I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time - Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy - and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me.
— Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
We have to actually choose a name," Kane murmured above her head. "We can't keep calling him 'baby.' When he's fifteen he might resent it.
— Christine Feehan, Ruthless Game
That's what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.
— Ivan Turgenev, Diary of a Superfluous Man
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
— Evelyn Waugh
When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven
— Barbara Kingsolver
A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn’t let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren’t we half-breeds too? Aren’t we half our mother, half our father?
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.
— Margaret Wise Brown
I just want my kids to love who they are, have happy lives and find something they want to do and make peace with that. Your job as a parent is to give your kids not only the instincts and talents to survive, but help them enjoy their l
— Susan Sarandon
God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home
I will continue to freak out my children by knitting in public. It's good for them.
— Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much
It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery.
— Ludwig van Beethoven
If I had my child to raise all over again,I’d finger paint more, and point the finger less.I’d do less correcting, and more connecting.I’d take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes.I would care to know less, and know to care more.I’d take more hikes and fly more kites.I’d stop playing serious, and seriously play.I’d run through more fields, and gaze at more stars.I’d do more hugging, and less tugging.I would be firm less often, and affirm much more.I’d build self esteem first, and the house later.I’d teach less about the love of power, and more about the power of love.
— Diane Loomans
If you were my child, I would staple you to your bedroom wall.
— Myra McEntire, Hourglass
All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.
— E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. 
— John Updike
...the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so.
— Roald Dahl, My Year
I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said
—  it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.
It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.
— Erik Erikson
[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.
— Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs
And what could my father possibly want with another child, when he hardly bothered to talk to the one he already had?
— Polly Shulman, Enthusiasm
I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
Sebastian it is. You can tell me what a patron saint is later, since I have no knowledge of such things. Sebastian Kane."Sebastian Kane Cannon. You're going to marry me and use my last name, right?""Is that supposed to be a proposal?
— Christine Feehan, Ruthless Game
The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.
— George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie
We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.
— Thomas McGuane
You're my life, Elle. When we have our children, they'll be included in that circle and I'm not a man to lose everything. I want you as safe as possible.""So you don't think three protection dogs, a room filled with weapons, a panic room and house that eats people isn't just a little overkill?
— Christine Feehan, Hidden Currents
Do you really think we'll ever--""I do," he said with certainty, not letting me finish. He leaned over and kissed my forehead. "I know it, Sassenach, and so do you. You were meant to be a mother, and I surely dinna intend to let anyone else father your children.
— Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.
— C.S. Lewis
Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid..and wish you'd just stayed in bed?
— Ransom Riggs, Hollow City
Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.
— Joe Hill, Locke & Key, Vol. 3: Crown of Shadows
Bear in mind, children, that they listen to you because you are kids—not because you are right. That's how our Father listens to us.
— Rich Mullins
within the core of each of us is the child we once were. This child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are, and what we will be.
— Rhawn Joseph
She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.
— Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters
Glimmer, I hear someone call her - ugh, the names the people in District 1 give their children are so ridiculous ...
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.
— Anita Shreve, Testimony
I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Our greatest duty to our children is to love them first.  Secondly, it is to teach them.  Not to frighten, force, or intimidate our children into submission, but to effectively teach them so that they have the knowledge and tools to govern themselves.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience. 
— Anatole Broyard
Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew.""He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six.""Right.""And you're the oldest.""Yes.""That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
Before I had kids, I always found it funny how people would talk about their children like they were the cutest things on the planet and how every little thing they did was endlessly fascinating. Now that I've had kids, I can say with certainty that, my children really are the cutest things on this planet and every little thing they do is endlessly fascinating...
— Jennifer Miller
It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels
— Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!
If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.
— Rita Dove
He was a poet
—  and they are never exactly grown-up.
Are parents always more ambitious for their children than they are for themselves?
— Jeffrey Archer, A Prisoner of Birth
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
— John Irving
Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.
— Neil Gaiman, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch
But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.
— Jerry Spinelli
Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objectsof affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing afaded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me nowto remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, halffancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it wasfolded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I wascomparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
In a woman's womb another chance to makethe world a better place.
— Ellen Hopkins
Someone once told me that children are like kites. You struggle just to get them in the air; they crash; you add a longer tail. Then they get caught in a tree; you climb up and bring them down, and untangle the string; you run to get them aloft again. Finally, the kite is airborne, and it flies higher and higher, as you let out more string, until it's so high in the sky, it looks like a bird. And if the string snaps, and you've done your job right, the kite will continue to soar in the wind, all by itself.
— Charmian Carr, Forever Liesl
If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
— Paul Graham
Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about.""Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre.
— Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
The move towards the extension of personhood to children is already underway, and is utterly, completely and totally unstoppable!
— Stefan Molyneux
The small hopes and plans and pleasures of children should be tenderly respected by grown-up people, and never rudely thwarted or ridiculed.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Men
Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
It takes so little to make a child happy, that it is a pity in a world full of sunshine and pleasant things, that there should be any wistful faces, empty hands, or lonely little hearts.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Men
I spend half my time comforting the afflicated, and the other half afflicting the comfortable.
— Wess Stafford
As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls.
— Tao Lin, Bed
…she rejoiced as only mothers can in the good fortunes of their children.
— Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys
Her magic formula for dealing with children is ignoring all faults and accenting tiny virtues. She says, "Instead of telling Tommy day in and day out that he is the naughtiest boy in the United States of America, which could very well be true, take an aspirin and comment on his neatly tied shoes. Almost anybody would rather be known for expert shoe-tying than for kicking the cat." She always tells whiners how charming they are--bullies how brave--bad sports how good--sneaks how honest!
— Betty MacDonald
No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff
The children almost broken by the world become the adults most likely to change it.
— Frank Warren
Have times really changed? Don't we today, as always, love our children and want them to live righteously? Don't we today, as always, need God's divine protecting care? Don't we today, as always, continue to be at his mercy and in his debt for the very life he has given us? 
— Thomas S. Monson, Pathways To Perfection: Discourses Of Thomas S. Monson
For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
I was very pleased with your kind letter. Until now I never dreamed of being something like a hero. But since you've given me the nomination I feel that I am one.
— Albert Einstein, Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein's Letters to and from Children
You cannot sacrifice the world for your children.
— Patricia Briggs, Raven's Strike
Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
... be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness...
— Ann Voskamp
The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.
— Clive Barker, The Thief of Always
The shame and the downfall of a modern materialistic society is her inability to treasure, care for, admire, adore, cherish, value, revere, respect, uphold, uplift, protect, shield, defend, safeguard, treasure and love her children. I praise all the cultures of this world that naturally harbor and actively manifest these instincts. If a nation or if a population of people fails to recognize the excellent value and distinction of the lives of her children and is defective enough to have lost the capability of expressing and acting upon these instincts then there is nothing that can save that nation or those people. The prosperity of a people is not measured in banks, financial markets, economy and the death of its humanity is evident not through the loss of life but in the loss of love for its children.
— C. JoyBell C.
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
— E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty-lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.
— Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
If the traditional Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are the basics that we want our children to master academically, then reverence, respect, and responsibility are the three Rs that our children need to master for the sake of their souls and the health of the world.
— Zoe Weil, Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Children are a battle of a different sort. ... A battle without banners or warhorns but no less fierce.
— George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
I used to think I'd be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Children are our future we must take care of them with maximum effort. 
— Naomi Campbell
One does silly things when one is twelve.
— Cassandra Clare
The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.
— Jane Smiley
But our forest is sacred & magical with many unusual creatures & plants.We don’t want people to destroy everything!
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.
— Christopher Morley
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life.
— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing
Conversing with children is a fine art.... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word.
— Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans
Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. 'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?' 'Yes, God has blessed me with all these children,' the rabbi replied. 'Haven't you heard about the population problem?'the woman sniffed. 'How many more children do you want to have?' Rabbi Teller paused and looked the woman in the eye: 'About 6 million,' he said.
— Lynn Vincent
I know what I really want for Christmas.I want my childhood back.Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child, of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of or hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded and terribly vulnerable to joy.
— Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Because she did not look behind, September did not see the smoky-glass casket close itself primly up again. She did not see it bend in half until it cracked, and Death hop up again, quite well, quite awake, and quite small once more. She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest, but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs.
— John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!
— Maurice Sendak
and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Progress should never be impeded by a need to coddle adults who respond to the world as children.
— Kelli Jae Baeli, Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology
One of the things that Christmas reminds us is that Jesus Christ was once a child.
— Hark Herald Sarmiento
When you hold a child to your breast to nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it sprang.
— Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber
Done because we are too many.
— Thomas Hardy
It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.
— George W. Bush
Better to have a messy home and happy children than a perfect yard and unhappy children
— Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg, The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules
Very young children often accept the paranormal as “normal” until adults squeeze it out them.
— Doug Dillon
They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.
— John McGahern, The Dark
Saturday mornings, I’ve learned, are a great opportunity for kids to sneak into your bed, fall back asleep, and kick you in the face.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
Are there any more beautiful words in the English dictionary than 'see you tomorrow?
— Jennifer Flackett, Little Manhattan: The Movie Novel
Oftentimes I felt ridiculous giving my seal of approval to what was in reality such a natural thing to do, sort of like reinventing the wheel and extolling its virtues. Had parents' intuition sunk so low that some strange man had to tell modern women that it was okay to sleep with their babies?
— William Sears, Sids: A Parent's Guide to Understanding and Preventing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been--it may even be greater--for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.
— Margaret Wise Brown
A mother who would stop at nothing for her child is dangerous woman when crossed.
— Solange nicole
The law of love could be best understood and learned through little children.
— Mahatma Gandhi
What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.
— Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.
— Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East
The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.
— Eileen Kennedy-Moore, Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child's True Potential
Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching those ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself 'what a prick.' Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly even flutters when we see a ten-year-old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn't notice anyway; you'd be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your tube carriage.
— Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well
We do children an enormous disservice when we assume that they cannot appreciate anything beyond drive through fare and nutritionally marginal, kid-targeted convenience foods. Our children are capable of consuming something that grew in a garden or on a tree and never saw a deep fryer. They are capable of making it through diner at a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths and no climbing equipment. Children deserve quality nourishment.
— Victoria Moran, Lit From Within: Tending Your Soul For Lifelong Beauty
There's a great power of imagination about these little creatures, and a creative fancy and belief that is very curious to watch . . . I am sure that horrid matter-of-fact child-rearers . . . do away with the child's most beautiful privilege. I am determined that Anny shall have a very extensive and instructive store of learning in Tom Thumbs, Jack-the-Giant-Killers, etc.
— William Makepeace Thackeray
For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.
— E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasionquicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ‘em. No, you had the right answer this afternoon, but the wrong reasons. Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re notattracting attention with it. Hotheadedness isn’t.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
All his words and actions would now be fit for his daughter’s ears and eyes. Life would be lived as if under [her] constant scrutiny. He would never do anything that might cause her pain or anxiety or embarrassment and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing in his life to be ashamed of anymore.
— David Nicholls, One Day
I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
— Howard Nemerov
We could see the children's toys here and there, and we saw a game that the children had made themselves out of dirt, deer antlers and abalone shells, but the game was so strange that only children could tell what it was. Perhaps it wasn't a game at all, only the grave of a game.
— Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur / Dreaming of Babylon / The Hawkline Monster
Grown-up people find it difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. That is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you can see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy; and why they say that the earth goes round the sun, when you can see for yourself any day that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night like a good sun as it is, and the earth knows its place, and lies as still as a mouse. Yet I daresay you believe all that about the earth and the sun, and if so you will find it quite easy to believe that before Anthea and Cyril and the others had been a week in the country they had found a fairy.
— E. Nesbit
People are incredibly rude about it sometimes. Like, `What? You`re married?` Strange reaction to have. Proves what people`s ideas about marriage are. `We`re having a baby.` `What?` As if it`s the end of the world. Of course, it`s the start of a brilliant world.
— Ewan McGregor
The only bright spot in the entire evening was the presence of Kevin "Tubby" Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity. The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole.
— David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice
You must feed them, Anne, else they eat their toys.
— Susan  Kaye, None But You
The culture without children is forever immature, self-obsessed and rightous. They cannot help the high opinion they have of themselves; there's no kids around to show them otherwise.
— James Wilson
Too bad,Elizabeth. You're Stuck with me.Not for a few decades,not for centuries. You're tied to me forever. That boy and girl offspring you talked off? They'll come from me--or no one.
— Kresley Cole, Lothaire
We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.
— Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
In God's eyes all children are beautiful but here on earth we have higher standards.
— Stephen Colbert
What she did have, after raising two children, was the equivalent of a PhD in mothering and my undying respect.
— Barbara Delinsky, Escape
I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.
— Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.
— Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories
May you always see the world through the eyes of a child.
— C.J. Heck
Everything that isn't gospel is law. Let us say it again: Everything that isn't gospel is law. Every way we try to make our kids good that isn't rooted in the good news of the life, death, ressurection, and assension of Jesus Christ is damnable, crushing, despair-breeding, Pharisee-producing law. We won't get the results we want from the law. We'll get either shallow self-righteousness or blazing rebellion or both (frequently from the same kid on the same day!). We'll get moralistic kids who are cold and hypocritical and who look down on others (and could easily become Mormons), or you'll get teens who are rebellious and self-indulgent and who can't wait to get out of the house. We have to remember that in the life of our unregenerate children, the law is given for one reason only: to crush their self-confidence and drive them to Christ.
— Elyse M. Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus
The only reason that they say, 'Women and children first' is to test the strength of the lifeboats.
— Jean Kerr
It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do not understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.
— John Connolly, The Gates
Potential is not an endpoint but a capacity to grow and learn.
— Eileen Kennedy-Moore, Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child's True Potential
A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... you kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... imagine our absence. We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
The poor are always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street there are groups of them from morning to night, hungry, naked and dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the appearance of flowers that have faded prematurely, because they grew in ground where there was no healthy nourishment.
— Maxim Gorky, Twenty-Six Men and a Girl and Other Stories
Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.
— Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
I'm afraid of those cows,' protested poor Dora, seeing a prospect of escape.'The very idea of your being scared of those cows,' scoffed Davy. 'Why, they're both younger than you.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
Tantrums are not bad behavior. Tantrums are an expression of emotion that became too much for the child to bear. No punishment is required. What your child needs is compassion and safe, loving arms to unload in.
— Rebecca Eanes, The Newbie's Guide to Positive Parenting
Charles realized that if he were going to apologize to Chrestomanci, he had better do it at once. He turned around to say it. But the folds had already rippled flat and nothing was the same anymore....
— Diana Wynne Jones, Witch Week
...Being a mother is like being a gardener of souls. You tend your children, make sure the light always touches them; you nourish them. You sow your seeds, and reap what you sow.
— Karen   White, Sea Change
The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.
— George Eliot, Silas Marner
You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally, and what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
— Erik Erikson
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
— John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick
The verbal patterns and the patterns of behavior we present to children in these lighthearted confections are likely to influence them for the rest of their lives. These aesthetic impressions, just like the moral teachings of early childhood, remain indelible.
— Esphyr Slobodkina
Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it. 
— Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories
The reasonableness of the command to obey parents is clear to children, even when quite young.
— Noah Webster
Children, brought up naturally and in freedom, not only have imagination, but live in a world of imagination more real to them than our reality. ("Absolute Evil")
— Julian Hawthorne, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
How much blood will it take to make them stop? How many more children must die?
— Brom, The Child Thief
It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
— Gregory Maguire, Lost
Please, let them be little,‘Cause they’re only that way for a while.Give them hope, give them praise,Give them love every day.Let ‘em cry, let ‘em giggle,Let ‘em sleep in the middle,Oh, but let them be little.
— Billy Dean
To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
People think that you are a nasty, selfish person if you don`t want to have children.
— Janeane Garofalo
It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.
— Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother
...Being a mother is like being a gardener of souls. You tend your children, make sure the light always touches them
— Karen   White
That was the tricky part. You poured inordinate amounts of time and attention and affection into your kids, but the result was indirect. You didn't point out a cat to your one-year-old and then watch him, minutes later, say 'Cat.' Instead, you pointed out a hundred cats to your one-year-old and then, one day, watched him point to a cat and say 'Mama.
— Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful
Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!
— Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland
It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.
— Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
She announced her age right away, for children consider their ages every bit as important as their names.
— Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar
I’m not smarter than you, I’m more knowledgeable than you, and that’s only because I’m older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
One winter morning Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see.
— Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day
If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.
— Bette Davis
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
— Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger's Daughter
The one encouragement we can always give our children (and one another) is that God is more powerful than our sin, and He's strong enough to make us want to do the right thing.
— Elyse M. Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus
The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
— George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House
The popular view that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.
— Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia
It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.
— John Irving
The sages advise us to study Torah lishma-"for its own sake" rather than to impress others with our scholarship. A paradox of parenting is that if we love our children for their own sake rather than for their achievements, it's more likely that they will reach their true potential.
— Wendy Mogel, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children
Raising kids is part joy and part guerilla warfare.
— Ed Asner
Children have such an innocent view of their world and surroundings
—  every thought is a garden full of wonder.
But the toaster was quite satisfied with itself, thank you. Though it knew from magazines that there were toasters who could toast four slices at a time, it didn't think that the master, who lived alone and seemed to have few friends, would have wanted a toaster of such institutional proportions. With toast, it's quality that matters, not quantity.
— Thomas M. Disch, The Brave Little Toaster
I have long held that there are two fundamental views of children: That they are pets who can talk, or that they are small people who do not yet know very much. The wrong one is winning.
— David Friedman
The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances, parents want to make up for lost time, to speed up a process that takes time.
— Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches