c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The miracle of children is that we just don’t know how they will change or who they will become.
— Eileen Kennedy-Moore, Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child's True Potential
Far more often [than asking the question 'Is it true?'] they [children] have asked me: 'Was he good? Was he wicked?' That is, they were far more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in History and in Faerie.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-stories
Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.
— Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass
I think this power of living in our children is one of the sweetest things in the world…
— Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys
The child's naive dream of life is the only one worth having.
— Marty Rubin
Children played at those stories
—  they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.
If you are ever called upon to chasten a person, never chasten beyond the balm you have within you to bind up.
— Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Volume 9
It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when the Great Creator was a child himself.
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
Parents have to instill the right principles in their children, but then it's up to the children to live up to those principles.
— Mary Lydon Simonsen, The Perfect Bride for Mr. Darcy
Gerald's look assured her that he and the others would be as near angels as children could be without ceasing to be human.
— E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle
I used to have more tolerance for these views, but I am losing patience with what I see. The test of anything is the fruit it bears. I see no good fruit being born.
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
... although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable--children themselves seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world. [p. 13]
— Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon
By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a ‘child’, of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good
— John Holt
Teaching our children to live a quiet, sane, and balanced life is one of the most important parental tasks of our day.
— Brent L. Top, Finding Inward Stillness:  Practical Applications of Christ's Atonement in Everyday Living
Life, Rose well knew, could throw some hard punches at you, but nothing hurt as much as losing a child, or seeing one of your children hurt and suffering. Becoming a parent changed you forever, as nothing else could. Not good or bad fortune. Not friendships. Not even a man or a woman.
— Jennifer Donnelly, The Wild Rose
Independance grows out of a child's faith that her source of security will always be there when she needs it.
— Kathleen Huggins, The Nursing Mother's Guide to Weaning
Child give me your hand so that I may walk in the light of your faith in me.
— Hannah Kahn
Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature's unpredictable creatures.
— Achy Obejas, Ruins
Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees.
— Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith
Julia heard from her mummy that fairies were gentle creatures with singing voices just like the mermaids.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.
— John Taylor Gatto
Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. H
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.
— Paul Auster, Moon Palace
It is only through my daughter that I have come to realise that a life without femininity – devoid of mystery, emotion, gentleness and the unerring power of a woman’s love – is no life at all.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
It’s time we stand up and demand more of the fathers of this world. It’s time we stop buying into their rationalizations and their sorry explanations. It’s time we give our kids a fighting chance.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
Don't you make fun of me or my children! Some babies are premature. Mine were all postmature. That's why they're so smart. Their brains had longer to develop.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Sometimes it is very difficult to keep in mind the fact that the parents, too, have reasons for what they do-- have reasons, locked in the depths of their personalities, for their inability to love, to understand, to give of themselves to their children.
— Virginia M. Axline, Dibs in Search of Self
Always believe in good and happiness. Never except "I can't" Always say I can..
— G.G. Bella, Happy Valley Pepo And Sully
Our children are watching us live, and what we ARE shouts louder than anything we can say.
— Wilfred A. Peterson
When you were a child, I didn't tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.
— Blake Crouch, Unconditional
I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it's killing me. I wanted everything for you, son.I still do.
— Blake Crouch, Unconditional
The dream too thinks twice, gets filtered to go softto be seated on children's eyes.
— Suman Pokhrel, Jeevanko Chheubaata
Do not make children cross-eyed, by having hair hang about their foreheads, where they see it continually.
— Lydia Maria Francis Child, The American Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy
Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling beganto affect the netting under which the three children lay.It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallicsound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This wasaccompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, andchilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brotherhad already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the littleone, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but ina very low tone, and with bated breath:--"Sir?""Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes."What is that?""It's the rats," replied Gavroche.And he laid his head down on the mat again.The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of theelephant, and who were the living black spots which we have alreadymentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long asit had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the sameas their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the goodstory-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves inthrongs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begunto bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.Still the little one could not sleep."Sir?" he began again."Hey?" said Gavroche."What are rats?""They are mice."This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice inthe course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, helifted up his voice once more."Sir?""Hey?" said Gavroche again."Why don't you have a cat?""I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ateher."This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the littlefellow began to tremble again.The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--"Monsieur?""Hey?""Who was it that was eaten?""The cat.""And who ate the cat?""The rats.""The mice?""Yes, the rats."The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which atecats, pursued:--"Sir, would those mice eat us?""Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:--"Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catchhold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland.The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox.The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides.The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun.The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus.The moral of the story?Kids are smart.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
The life of a mother is the life of a child: you are two blossoms on a single branch.
— Karen Maezen Miller, Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood
The innocence of children is what makes them stand out as a shining example to the rest of Mankind.
— Kurt Chambers
No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
— Beverly Cleary
Encourage don't belittle, embrace their individuality. And show them that no matter what they will always have value if they stay true to themselves.
— Solange nicole
I feel about my dogs now, and all the dogs I had prior to this, the way I feel about children—they are that important to me. When I have lost a dog I have gone into a mourning period that lasted for months.
— Mary Tyler Moore
What a difference it makes to come home to a child!
— Margaret Fuller
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event
— Gaston Bachelard
Something wrong with your child? Feed them and put them to bed. Something wrong with your man? Feed him and take him to bed. Lady Jeeha "Wolf Dawn
— Susan Cartwright
Everybody who has a baby thinks everybody who hasn't a baby ought to have a baby,Which accounts for the success of such plays as the Irish Rose of Abie,The idea apparently being that just by being fruitfulYou are doing something beautiful,Which if it is trueMeans that the common housefly is several million times more beautiful than me or you.
— Ogden Nash, Free Wheeling
How is it?" I ask as we stroll towards the dressing rooms. "Working at the playground. That must be fun.""Sure, they're just adorable," she says, "For the first five minutes. And then I want to wring their adorable little necks."I stop, shocked. "I always figured you loved kids.""Yeah, no." Kayla shakes her head emphatically. "One kid, I can do, even two-- just stick them in front of a Disney movie, let them play Xbox all night. But a herd of them?" She shudders.
— Abby McDonald, Getting Over Garrett Delaney
Children in the abstract, had never appealed to me. They seemed to be loud creatures, often dripping some form of goo.
— Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn
I have always believed that poems beg to be read aloud, even if the reader is in a world all her own.
— J. Patrick Lewis, The Last Resort
Sometimes in our attempt to give children what we did not have, we forget to give our children what we did have.
— Connie Podesta
On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down.
— Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
I realize that some people will not believe that a child of little more than ten years is capable of having such feelings. My story is not intended for them. I am telling it to those who have a better knowledge of man. The adult who has learned to translate a part of his feelings into thoughts notices the absence of these thoughts in a child, and therefore comes to believe that the child lacks these experiences, too. Yet rarely in my life have I felt and suffered as deeply as at that time.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
My life has been shaped by the decision two people made over 24 years ago. They decided to adopt a child. They got me, and I got a chance at the kind of life all children deserve.
— Karen Fowler, Reflections on Motherhood
And upon his return, Gherkins, who had always considered his uncle as a very top-hatted sort of person, actually saw him take from his handkerchief-drawer an undeniable automatic pistol.It was at this point that Lord Peter was apotheosed from the state of Quite Decent Uncle to that of Glorified Uncle
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Views the Body
She says I shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing.Well! This is one side of the story, to be sure, but I look at the other. Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ's name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother's heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!
— Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, Stepping Heavenward
Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
— Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
You are what you eat. What would YOU like to be?
— Julie  Murphy, Nutrition Across A Lifetime
Mr. Crossley suddenly wondered why he was why he was worrying about the note. It was only a joke, after all. He cleared his throat. Everyone looked up hopefully. 'Somebody,' said Mr. Crossley, 'seems to have sent me a Halloween message.' And he read out the note: 'SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH.'6B thought this was splendid news. Hands shot up all over the room like a bed of beansprouts.'It's me, Mr. Crossley!''Mr. Crossley, I'm the witch!''Can I be the witch, Mr. Crossley?''Me, Mr. Crossley, me, me, me!
— Diana Wynne Jones, Witch Week
The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
— John Updike, Rabbit, Run
When kids made a decision for themselves they have a vested interest in showing they were right. Lee wanted to prove to me that he had made the right choice so he worked hard and did well. If we'd forced him to go to college somewhere else all the incentives would've been different. Then he would have had a motive to prove that we were wrong.
— Cokie Roberts, From This Day Forward
But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.
— Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.Jordan...I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.
— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
If a child shows himself to be incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.
— Don Marquis
Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or flea that lived on the bodies of men. If...there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
…no person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Men
She’s happier than Nicola. That’s probably true. Alcoholics can stop drinking but what is there for the children of alcoholics? Is it always too late? Probably. She doesn’t know.
— Roddy Doyle, Paula Spencer
To have my life accepted as just another ordinary life, to have it viewed as common and regular, was a singular moment.
— Katherine A. Briccetti
Soeur Marie Emelie"Soeur Marie Emelieis little and very old:her eyes are onyx,and her cheeks vermilion,her apron wide and kindand cobalt blue.She comfortsgenerations and generationsof children,who are "new"at the convent school.When they are eight,they are already up to her shoulder,they grow up and go into the world,she remains,forever,always incredibly old,but incredibly never older...She has an affinity with the hens,When a hen dies,she sits down on a bench and cries,she is the only grown-up, whose tears are not frightening tears.Children can weep without shame, at her side...Soeur Marie Emelie...her apron as wide and kindas skies on a summer dayand as clean and blue.
— Caryll Houselander, The Flowering Tree
The room was full of magical objects, animals, photographs, paintings, strange looking plants and many flying books. I only found this room a few days ago and it seems that it keeps changing every time I come.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
We are bent on weakening bonds in the name of growth and independance,then spend out adulthoods wondering why we have trouble getting close to other people.
— Elizabeth Hormann, Breastfeeding an Adopted Baby and Relactation
Julia really likes school and she is one of the top students. Mikolay doesn’t mind the weekend school because he is allowedto do lots of magic, which he really likes and is very good at.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
We think of communication as words. But a screaming child is trying to say something. A tantrum carries a message. Hitting is communication. Sleep patterns carry a message. Even the sulky belligerence of a teen is an attempt to convey a message. Everything the child does says something to the person who is willing to take the time to listen carefully.
— Christopher Page
There's nothing more toxic or deadly than a human child. A single touch could kill you.
— James Coburn
There can be no fooling ourselves into thinking this is something other than what it is—the willful ejection of Molly from our nest. It’s too late for second thoughts, anyway. She has to be moved into her dorm in time for freshman orientation. It’s been marked on the kitchen calendar for weeks—the expiration date on her childhood.
— Susan Wiggs, The Goodbye Quilt
Children who paddle where the ocean bed shelves steeplyMust take great care they do not, Paddle too deeply.'Thus spake the awful aging coupleWhose heart the years had turned to rubble.But the little children, to save any brother,Let it in at one ear and out at the other.
— Stevie Smith, Selected Poems
How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers." ~ Mother Teresa of Calcutta
— Mother Teresa
Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.
— John Edgar Wideman
Only children simply accept the fact that their parents have the right to make choices for them. Even disobedient children never question the fact that their parents have that right. They may choose to flout the rules, but they don't question their parents' right to make those rules.
— The Mirror of Maybe
Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?" when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it any further. | So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. "If it had grown up," she said to herself, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes a rather handsome pig, I think." And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, "if one only knew the right way to change them--" when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
If history repeats itself, I am so getting a dinosaur!
— Anonymous
As I cooked in the cauldron of motherhood, the incredible love I felt for my children opened my heart and brought me a much greater understanding of universal love. It made me understand the suffering of the world much more deeply.
— Tsultrim Allione
We are the children of the earth and removed from her our spirit withers.
— George Macaulay Trevelyan
New Rule: Don't name your kid after a ballpark. Cubs fans Paul and Teri Fields have named their newborn son Wrigley. Wrigley Fields. A child is supposed to be an independent individual, not a means of touting your own personal hobbies. At least that's what I've always taught my kids, Panama Red and Jacuzzi.
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with her belly, but he had never lived in there; he could touch her breast, but he never drunk from it.
— Milan Kundera
I use Fiction to face Reality And write sweet Stories to avoid the bitter ones.
— Talia, Kay Kay, My Super Hero Koala Bear!
Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don't ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality - this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can't do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is - why aren't they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they'd been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn't want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife.
— William Golding
By Rachel Corrie, aged 10 — 1990I’m here for other children.I’m here because I care.I’m here because children everywhere are suffering and because forty thousand people die each day from hunger.I’m here because those people are mostly children.We have got to understand that the poor are all around us and we are ignoring them.We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable.We have got to understand that people in third world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us.We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs.We have got to understand that they are us. We are them.My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.My dream is to give the poor a chance.My dream is to save the 40,000 people who die each day.My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there.If we ignore hunger, that light will go out.If we all help and work together, it will grow and burn free with the potential of tomorrow.
— Rachel Corrie
How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month's separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.
— Jesse Ball, The Curfew
One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children
— Ron Rash, Serena
People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.
— Colum McCann
Yes, but nomes aren’t hard to make,” said Dorcas. “You just need other nomes.” “You’re weird.
— Terry Pratchett, Diggers
I have a theory about how she might have managed to pull off such a feat. It comes in the form of an equation: Love + Fear = Herculean Strength. It’s how mothers come to fling runaway motorcars from their children.
— Franny Billingsley, Chime
The music world is where child prodigies go to die.
— Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
The imaginary child implied by the toys on exhibit in Hong Kong was impossible to reconcile with my actual child. I didn't think I'd like to meet the imaginary child they implied. That child was mad with contradictions. He was a machine-gun-toting, Chopin-playing psychopath with a sugar high and a short attention span.
— Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
Oh no, princess. I would never carry out anything which could harm your being. This was just something I was told to say. I'm not sure what is planned, if, you go against their wishes. But, I'm sure you're smart and won't test them.
— Chayada Welljaipet, The Adventures of Luciana
John and I noticed that whenever we talked about our children Wystan reached for his cats.
— Thekla Clark
Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in theirpower, which no subsequent connections can supply..
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
There were still few rules at Down House, and Charles was not very good at enforcing the ones he and Emma did make. This was well known among his children. In 1855, when Lenny was about five, Charles walked in to find his son jumping up and down and tumbling all over a new sofa.'Oh Lenny, Lenny,' Charles said. 'You know it is against all rules.''Then,' Lenny said to his papa, 'I think you'd better go out of the room.'And so Charles did.
— Deborah Heiligman
It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.
— Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales
the seriousness of emotional deprivation:It is not difficult to understand how children who have suffered from malnutrition or starvation need food and plenty of care in their bodies are to recover so they can go on to lead normal lives. If, however, the starvation is severe enough, the damage will be permanent and they will suffer physical impairments for the rest of their lives. Likewise, children who are deprived of emotional nurturing require care and love if their sense of security and self-confidence is to be restored. However, if love is minimal and abuse high, the damage will be permanent and the children will suffer emotional impairments for the rest of their lives.
— Mark Z. Danielewski
Adults had the notion that juveniles needed to suffer. Only when they had suffered enough to wipe out most of their naturally joyous spirits and innocence were they staid enough to be considered mature. An adult was essentially a broken-down child.
— Piers Anthony, Centaur Aisle
Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.
— William Faulkner, Light in August
Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles—and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
You are not too small. No one is ever too small to offer help.
— Emlyn Chand, Honey the Hero
They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions...
— Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
— George Orwell, 1984
Logically, I understand that it wasn't Edward's fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you're eleven years old, you don't give a flip about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother's hand.
— Jodi Picoult, Lone Wolf
Hey, ants!" she shouted. "Please help. Anteater is very hungry, but cannot find any food.
— Emlyn Chand, Honey the Hero
Wait," Honey said to herself, as she realized something amazing. "I’m already an excellent flyer. Maybe I can fight crime too.
— Emlyn Chand, Honey the Hero
They had always dreamed of a large family but have now realized that they would be equally blessed to have even one child.
— Jane Green, Another Piece of My Heart
Looking at the children, she knew that any hope for a new life would have to grow within her. She glanced at Nate, wondering if he felt as she did, that children were the only consolation in this world, the only recompense for so much suffering.
— Laura Brodie, The Widow's Season
At this stage of my life, I've finally come to realize I've learned more from my children than they ever learned from me.
— C.J. Heck
Every happy memory created for a child is another treasure of a lifetime.
— Donna Marie
Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
We can all agree that children are ugly.
— Josh Lieb, I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President
The greatest duty of mankind lies in the proper uprearing of our children. The fact is recognized, but is the duty fulfilled? Do we rear our children as we should? There is but one answer: We fail. Teaching them many things for their good, we yet keep from them ignorantly, foolishly, with a hesitancy and neglect unpardonable—knowledge, the possession of which is essential for their future welfare.
— George F. Butler, Every Girl's Book
I believe, as followers of Christ, we are commanded to reach out to the least of these in the name of Jesus and show them they matter a great deal to God, who sacrificed His only Son to reach them with His love.
— K.P. Yohannan, No Longer a Slumdog: Bringing Hope to Children in Crisis
Kids are a pain in the ass.
— Harold Robbins, Piranhas
When a baby is born the mother in particular enters into a new larger relationship with the world. She has become connected to all people. She is part of keeping us on earthnot the "us" comprised of individuals but the species itself. By protecting this one baby this gift a mother accepts life's clearest responsibility.
— Gavin de Becker, Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe
I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.
— Johann Hari
From time to time I try to imagine this world of which he spoke--a culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, in which words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart; a society in which words are holy, and the challenge of life is based upon the quest for gentle words, holy words, gentle truths, holy truths. I try to imagine for myself a world in which the words one gives one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's words carefully, like precious gifts, like magnificent gifts, like magnificent inheritances, for they convey an excess of what we have imagined, they bear gifts beyond imagination, they reveal and revisit the wealth of history. How carefully, how slowly, and how lovingly we might step into our expectations of each other in such a world.
— Patricia J. Williams, The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice
I love fairies so much. I would so love to touch one, whispered Julia in excitement. “U can touch me.But please don't touch my wings,they are very fragile,”replied 1 fairy.“I’m Farina,the fairy queen.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
Many trees were pulled out of the ground with their roots crying for water.” The lake was all polluted with thick layers of grease,the grass & flowers were squashed, animals walked around. #kidsbooks "Mikolay & Julia"Total elocological destruction,said Mikolay trying to use one of the funny long words Julia was always using.These are not monsters Farina.These are people and building machines.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world...
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
He liked to feel the soft little hand clasping his own fingers, so big and coarse in comparison, and happily so strong. For in the child's weakness he felt an infinite pathos; a being so entirely helpless, so utterly dependent upon others' love, standing there amid a world of cruelties, smiling and trustful.
— George Gissing
Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy's thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to dance. She thought of herself and Tacy and Tib going into their 'teens. She even thought of Tom and Herbert and of how, by and by, they would be carrying her books and Tacy's and Tib's up the hill from high school.
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming -- their trust that they are safe simply because he's with them, as if an adult presence warded of all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable forcefield.
— Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
The people who run the circus kidnapped us from our parents. Since we got here, we have all been working in the circus. We can’t see any of our mummies or kiss them OR cuddle up to them. said Adrian.His tears flowing in his big blue eyes that were the colour of the sky. We didn’t want to listen to our parents when they told us: ‘Never, Ever!” talk to strangers. We all disobeyed and spoke to strangers, and then the strangers stole us away from our parents.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia in the Attic
I don't hold Travis anymore, of course- not to read to him, or for any other reason, either. I wish I'd known that the last time was going to be the last time.
— Elizabeth Berg
Men are all alike. Grown-up children.
— Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Keeper: A Novel
Me & my fellow fairies are running away from a huge monster that keeps destroying our home land,sobbed Farina.The monster is terribly scary,has huge jaws, creates clouds of smoke & makes loads of noise everywhere it goes.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
Mikolay had explored the big attic many times before, and he knew that his mummy misplaced boxes all the time. Ah, I,don’t really want a wand, um, that much. Can we go home now? “Please? begged Julia as she walked toward the door. But Mikolay grabbed her hand and whispered:Lets just see where the shadow is going and after that, we can go right home.Mikolay and Julia carefully moved closer and closer to the wall.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia in the Attic
Mikolay took his wand out, touched the cage’s lock and said: “Eis Izras” three times. The door opened at once, unfortunately making lots of noise and waking the humans up. Mikolay knew a few powerful hexes and he was able to create small flying dragons. He hoped that he could stop the people, animals, and block the shadows to buy some time.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia in the Attic
Wow!” gasped Julia. They saw 20 or more young children of every sort lyingon the cold, bare ground.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia in the Attic
Suddenly, the shadow disappeared through the wall! Maybe the shadow disappeared again.Can we please go back home now?I really don’t like it here & I’m scared! Julia pleaded.The shadow was standing by a very small cage, pointing its long, thin finger towards the floor.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia in the Attic
We need to get to the other side of the lake if you want to help the fairies,” said Mikolay.We could use my crystal ball for transportation,” suggested Julia pulling out a small crystal ball out of her pocket.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
We live in the fairy forest of huge trees which is on the other side of the lake, said Farina.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
When Mikolay and Julia are not at school, they usually go exploring and adventuring. Mikolay’s and Julia’s mummies are both witches and are in charge of fixing things.
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
Come on, this is a real adventure I have here, screamed Mikolay again, this time more impatiently.I think someone is singing inside the wardrobe. Can you hear that?
— Magda M. Olchawska, Mikolay and Julia Meet the Fairies
Children accept many things adults will not accept, since the world of a child is a constant revelation without any need for knowledge of cause and effect. ("Miss Esperson")
— August Derleth
While you may be able to keep your son Jimmy from owning [a gun], if you try to talk him out of wanting one, you are up against a pretty strong argument: You mean I shouldn't want a device that grants me power and identity, makes me feel dangerous and safe at the same time, instantly makes me the dominant male, and connects me to my evolutionary essence? Come on, Mom, get real!
— Gavin de Becker, Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe
I also saw that theologically speaking the whole idea of a smacking is not congruent with the teaching revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. God sent His Son into the world to save the world so they would not have to suffer for their own sins, but parents today punish their children and make them undergo the horrors of punishment for even the most minor of infractions. The idea of mercy is seemingly not applied at all. When parents' sin, they ask God to forgive them, repent and know they are forgiven. When children sin, they are judged, tried, condemned and punished.
— Samuel Martin, Thy Rod and Thy Staff They Comfort Me: Christians and the Spanking Controversy
I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.
— Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
-Bumblebee bat, how do you see at night?-I make a squeaky sound that bounces back from whatever it hits. I see by hearing.
— Darrin Lunde, Hello, Bumblebee Bat
Weston: Look at my outlook. You don't envy it, right?Wesley: No.Weston: That's because it's full of poison. Infected. And you recognize poison, right? You recognize it when you see it?Wesley: Yes.Weston: Yes, you do. I can see that you do. My poison scares you.Wesley: Doesn't scare me.Weston: No?Wesley: No.Weston: Good. You're growing up. I never saw my old man's poison until I was much older than you. Much older. And then you know how I recognized it?Wesley: How?Weston: Because I saw myself infected with it. That's how. I saw me carrying it around. His poison in my body.
— Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class
Which story do you want to hear my child?"he picked him up and made him sit on his lap."Tell us the story of that fairy who lived in a house of wafers,had a garden of chocolate trees and a pond full of goldfishes,"the child wrapped his arms around his shoulder.
— Chitralekha Paul, Delayed Monsoon
There was a pleasant party of barge people round the fire. You might not have thought it pleasant, but they did; for they were all friends or acquaintances, and they liked the same sort of things, and talked the same sort of talk. This is the real secret of pleasant society.
— E. Nesbit, The Railway Children
It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn't.
— Patrick White, The Vivisector
Children are very nice observers, and they will often perceive our slightest defects. It general those who govern children forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.
— François Fénelon
Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes
—  fathers that children with their judgment looked
We came around the corner and stood in the doorway of what looked like a paint-testing ground. This was where we proved once and for all that we were good loving parents. We decided to let him live."What is painting doing in my best Tupperware bowl?" I yelled."Well, I needed something lightweight I could carry around with me," he began."You've been carrying around a brain for year," the boy's father said.
— Sylvia Harney, Every Time I Go Home I Break Out in Relatives
In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
The notion of children makes me ill. The thought of having one... when you see those guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking idea of it, the very word: family. Whenever I see it, on travel brochures, on house schedules... I feel sick.
— John Niven, Kill Your Friends
Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the windows at me.It would be alarming for them to see me with their dolls, to see me using the knife on their faces. There are some things children never should see.
— Kate Bernheimer, The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold
The city gives even to children a sophisticated look that baffles the casual psychologist.
— Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Enchanted Canyon