Quotes about children

79 quotes · 37 authors

Quotes

  1. Halfway down the stairs

    Is a stair

    Where I sit.

    There isn't any

    Other stair

    Quite like

    It.

    I'm not at the bottom,

    I'm not at the top;

    So this is the stair

    Where

    I always

    Stop.

    Halfway up the stairs

    Isn't up,

    Isn't down.

    It isn't in the nursery,

    It isn't in the town.

    And all sorts of funny thoughts

    Run round my head:

    "It isn't really

    Anywhere!

    It's somewhere else

    Instead!"

  2. My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches [things] I had done...and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world.

  3. The child speaks words with his memory long before he speaks them with his tongue.

  4. Divorce. Its existence and use should be determined only by the interests of the children.

  5. "When you argue with a child," she said warmly, "you give a good argument and the child says yah, yah! You understand him and he doesn't listen, so the child wins."

  6. The way language came to children was incredible. They were all geniuses at that age, it took adults years and years to twist them down into the bonsai creatures they eventually became. Whou would dare to do that, who would dare deform this natural child? No one; and yet it got done. No one did it and everyone did it.

    p. 757

  7. Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

  8. Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.

  9. Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

  10. All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.

    p. 242

  11. Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

  12. Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.

    p. 74