Children
Quotes - My objective is to create my own world
“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
“Pirate Captain Jim
"Walk
the plank," says Pirate Jim
"But
Captain Jim, I cannot swim."
"Then
you must steer us through the gale."
"But
Captain Jim, I cannot sail."
"Then
down with the galley slaves you go."
"But
Captain Jim, I cannot row."
"Then
you must be the pirate's clerk."
"But
Captain Jim, I cannot work.”
― Shel Silverstein
“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
“If you're like most members
of the Baby Boom generation, you decided somewhere along the line, probably
after about four margaritas, to have children. This was inevitable. Mother
Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological
instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come
what may, will never have any disposable income.”
― Dave Barry
“Parents don’t know their
children at all.
No
one knows anyone, in fact.”
― Jenny Downham, You
Against Me
“It is the time you have
wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
― Antoine de Saint
Exupery, The Little Prince
“Children are notoriously
curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to
know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon
them, and they will be curious about everything.”
― Floyd Dell
“Long before I wrote stories,
I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than
listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes
on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin,
children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its
hole.”
― Eudora Welty, One
Writer's Beginnings
“I wonder if other mothers
feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people
they themselves wanted so badly to be.”
― Jodi Picoult,
Keeping Faith
“The aspiration to save the
world is a morbid phenomenon of today's youth.”
― Marilyn Manson
“Each child’s story is worthy
of telling. There shouldn’t be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is
crushing.”
― Anderson Cooper,
Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival
“And as I watched him, I knew
that in every dark night there was, somewhere, a small light burning that could
never be quenched.”
― Juliet Marillier,
Son of the Shadows
“I have a private theory,
Sir, that there are no heroes and no monsters in this world. Only children
should be allowed to use these words”
― Alfred de Vigny,
Stello
“This idea that children
won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of
the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that
were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to
me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do
anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I
wouldn't do anything."
It
is the creed of a slave.”
― John Holt, How
Children Fail
“Fairy tales in childhood are
stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The
value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in
the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even
the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of
hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to
light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the
face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the
reality.”
― L.R. Knost
“A mother only does her
children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham,
The Razor’s Edge
“My objective is to create my
own world and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images
which they are. We have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art: we treat it
like editors, searching in it for that which the artist has supposedly hidden.
It is actually much simpler than that, otherwise art would have no meaning. You
have to be a child—incidentally children understand my pictures very well, and
I haven’t met a serious critic who could stand knee-high to those children. We
think that art demands special knowledge; we demand some higher meaning from an
author, but the work must act directly on our hearts or it has no meaning at
all.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky
“Isn't a kid alive who
doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.”
― Chuck Palahniuk,
Snuff
“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
