quotations about children
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
PHYLLIS DILLER
Woman's Day, Aug. 2011
They're all mistakes, children! Filthy, nasty things. Glad I never was one.
AGATHA TRUNCHBULL
Matilda
When a child is born, the locus of one’s hopes ... shifts, slightly. Not altogether, not all at once. But you feel it, this displacement. You speak up, strike attitudes, like the mother of a tiny Lollabrigida. Drunk with possibility once more.
DONALD BARTHELME
"See the Moon?"
Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.
MICHAEL LEWIS
Altering Fate
There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
radio broadcast, Mar. 21, 1943
Children are like paintings that start at birth with only broad genetic strokes on an otherwise blank canvas. During infancy, more distinct shapes and colors add to the complexity of the canvas. Then, in toddler-hood and during the preschool and elementary school years, more precise strokes, textures, and colors allow us to begin to see what the final work of art might look like. You are the principal artist at this stage. Eventually, your child will take over and continue to refine the work of art until it becomes a genuine self-portrait. Your messages during your children's early years are the most important contributions you will make to the masterpiece that they will become.
JIM TAYLOR
Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You
Look around you. Everywhere. They are there. In every home -- lurking in dark corners ... small, bi-pedal entities with almost human brains play their games in which adults are the pawns. They play and wait for the time when they will take over the world!
JOHN BLAIR MOORE
Invaders from Home
Children consume and fracture our lives. Children drag us towards disaster, it's unavoidable. When you see those laughing couples casting off into the sea of matrimony, you say to yourself, they have no idea, poor things, they just have no idea, they're happy. No one tells you anything when you start out. I have an old school pal who's just about to have a child with his new girlfriend. I said to him, "A child, at your age, are you insane?" The ten or dozen good years left to us before we get cancer or a stroke, and you're going to bugger yourself up with some brat?
YASMINA REZA
The God of Carnage
Life doesn't count for much unless you're willing to do your small part to leave our children – all of our children – a better world. Even if it's difficult. Even if the work seems great. Even if we don't get very far in our lifetime.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Jun. 15, 2008
Children are shaped like us, torso and legs and ears and all, yet on a scale all their own -- subcompact people made for a better but also a smaller planet.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
Children are just like people, only smaller.
FRASER
"An Eye for an Eye", Due South
Children are sweet as the buds in spring,
But I've noticed that those who have them
Have nothing but trouble all their lives.
EURIPIDES
Medea
Children should be judged on what they are -- a punishment for an early marriage.
ERMA BOMBECK
I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression
Only to children children sing,
Only to youth will spring be spring.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Harp
The soul is healed by being with children.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Idiot
Nothing matters more to a child than a place to call home.
BRENDA DONALD
"Brenda Donald: Mission possible for Maryland: 1,000 new foster parents by 2010", Examiner, February 5, 2008
Although we like to think of young children's lives as free of troubles, they are in fact filled with disappointment and frustration. Children wish for so much, but can arrange so little of their own lives, which are so often dominated by adults without sympathy for the children's priorities. That is why children have a much greater need for daydreams than adults do. And because their lives have been relatively limited they have a greater need for material from which to form daydreams.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Freud's Vienna and Other Essays
This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
It's pretty easy to kind of lose your way. Having kids is really helpful. They kind of disabuse you of the notion of your greatness pretty quickly.
MATT DAMON
Good Housekeeping, Jul. 2010
To have a child when you're older, it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things, you know, afresh. It forces the world on you. And I think it's a good thing.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
interview, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Jun. 1, 2008