Quotes about children

Although knowledge of how things work is sufficient to allow manipulation of nature, what humans really want to know is why things work. Children don't ask how the sky is blue. They ask why the sky is blue.

If you want creative and successful children, resign yourself to jousting with rebels.

The reality is, we don’t want our kids to be smart. We want them to be like us. Only more so.

The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

“If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact—while it lasts—that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.”

“Your son was in your own tradition.”

“Better, I hope,” said the old man. “There would be little sense to existence, did boys have no chance to be more than their fathers.”

Newborns reminded her of tiny Buddhas, faces full of divinity […] That holiness, somehow, disappeared, and Lacy was always left wondering where in this world it might go.

How could you change a boy’s bedding every week and feed him breakfast and drive him to the orthodontist and not know him at all?

What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hogwash about students at college having to be treated as adults—there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!

Do you remember that little boy, Papa?

Yes. I remember him.

Do you think that he’s all right that little boy?

Oh yes. I think he’s all right.

Do you think he was lost?

No. I don't think he was lost.

I’m scared that he was lost.

I think he’s all right.

But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?

Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

"And what makes one man's life more interesting than another’s?"

"In general, I should say that we find unpredictable or novel things more interesting."

…"You yourself said that the engineers in the Bespoke department—the very best—had led interesting lives, rather than coming from the straight and narrow. Which implies a correlation, does it not?”

"Clearly."

"This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting.”