Quotes About Children

Moms never get out of the kid business. Last time I checked, motherhood had no expiration date.

she knew from her practice that kids who felt terrible about their parents somehow ended up feeling terrible about themselves.

They say life is short, but the truth is, motherhood is short.

You have been a good mother to your children, but now you must be an even better and stronger mother. Children are hope and joy. On land, you will be a mother. In the sea, you can be a grieving widow. Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet. This I know. If you try to live, you can live on well.

Other kids get white rice, but the food you give us makes it look like we're living a subsistence life." "I buy white rice for the New Year's Festival," I said, stung. Then, defensively, "I often put barley in your lunch –" "Which is even more embarrassing, because that means we're really poor." "What a lucky child you are to say that. You don't know what poor means –

Every mother must leave her children to work, and every mother suffers, bu we do it.

As for children, every woman knows the fears and sorrows. Joy is a delicious luxury that we experience most cautiously, for tragedy conceals itself around every corner.

As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can't make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don't meet our artificial expectations.

You were never so acutely aware of your own flaws as you were in the presence of your child. Why was that?

But his efforts were fractional compared to hers; and her praise was equal in measure to the encouragement she doled out to the children for their drawings that showed little talent, their stilted piano playing, or middling efforts on the soccer field. Not lies, exactly.

But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you'd done when you were heedless of the fragility of life.

Is there anyone dearer than the children of people you love, especially when you don't have your own?

seemed like that was all it was, motherhood—grief and guilt and fear. You said good-bye a little every day—from the minute they left your body until they left your home. But no, that wasn't all. There was that love, that wrenching, impossible love.

The hardest thing about being a parent is watching your kids make mistakes. Our instinct is to protect you. But you're right, Deenie. Sometimes we have to step aside and let you make them anyway. The best we can do is be there when you mess up.

In an age that seems to be increasingly dehumanized, when people can be transformed into non-persons, and where a great deal of our adult art seems to diminish our lives rather than add to them, children's literature insists on the values of humanity and humaneness.

Each day of war takes us farther from all we could hope to be or do. We gain nothing but heartbreak, and lose everything we cherish. Our lives erode and diminish, our children see no future except a calendar of anguish and death. Our only hope for tomorrow is for peace now.

Children's literature as a literary aberration or at best a minor amusement is a notion held most strongly by people who read the fewest children's books. I think it was Ruth Hill Viguers who compared this attitude with asking a pediatrician when he's going to stop fooling around and get down to the serious business of treating adults.

On the level of high art, in their common efforts to express human truths, relationships, attitudes, and personal visions, children's literature and adult literature meet and sometimes merge, and we wonder then whether a given work is truly for children or truly for grown-ups. The answer, of course, is: for both.

Writing for children can be completely honest in non-cynical ways. In adult books you're required to be cynical. It embarrasses us to say positive things. You can have affection and hope in children's books, but that is out of fashion in adult fiction.

For all for children To whom we entrust the future

Dangers were no more than odd imaginings, like ghost stories that children made up to frighten one another: things that couldn't possibly happen.

The guardians with their stern faces had no creative power. But they had strength and cunning, and they had found a way to steal and harness other people's powers for their own needs. They were forcing the children to describe the future they wanted, not the one that could be.

The Willoughby parents frequently forgot that they had children and became quite irritable when they were reminded of it.

Two children—one male, one female—to each family unit.