Quotes About Children

Buddy had spent a great deal of time at the children's ward at the hospital over on the Turnpike. Every Saturday, during Ben's magic act, he was pulled out of a hat that was old and smelled of alfalfa and sweat. Buddy was used to bright lights and people crying, and he was always well behaved. He had never once bitten a child, not even when he'd been poked or teased. Now, he rose onto his back legs and balanced carefully, just as he'd been taught.

There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us.

But the logic of fairy tales was that there was no logic: bad things happened to the innocent, children were set out in the woods by their parents, fear walked hand in hand with experience, a wish spoken aloud could make it so.

As the summer passed, I began to feel free. I had time to myself, and I enjoyed watching over the children. I felt a sort of joy I'd never felt before. I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy.

There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires.

that at the conference in Evian as far back as 1938, thirty-two countries in the League of Nations had voted not to help Jewish refugees fleeing Germany? Even America had refused to accept 20,000 endangered refugee children.

Did they not know that at the conference in Evian as far back as 1938, thirty-two countries in the League of Nations had voted not to help Jewish refugees fleeing Germany? Even America had refused to accept 20,000 endangered refugee children.

Il y avait dans leur regard, ainsi que dans le geste de Mr. Carpenter, un air de propriétaire. Comme si, après s'être approprié les trottoirs et les rues, ils s'apprêtaient maintenant à s'approprier les enfants qui y jouaient.

The fourth contraction seized her and suddenly she was perspiring. She heard herself cry out and then she heard the children's voices like sparks struck from her own. And then heard a man call "Hello," the single word across what seemed a great distance. Calmly, because the pain was once again subsiding (she recalled the rhythm of the hurricane), she turned her head toward the vestibule. It

The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse—the way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the terrific thunderclap of the ocean.

Then he noticed her boys. They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a comforting arm around each.

All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.

To forget and to repress would be a good solution if there were no more to it than that. But repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms. And the worst thing is that although the feelings of the abused child have been silenced at the point of origin, that is, in the presence of those who caused the pain, they find their voice when the battered child has children of his own.

Theoretically, I can imagine that someday we will regard or children not add creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, but which we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to.

Hesse, like so many gifted children, was so difficult for his parents to bear not despite but because of his inner riches. Often a child's very gifts (his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness—and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations.

We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as persons. In any case, I don't know of a single person who enjoyed this respect as a child and then as an adult had the need to put other human beings to death.

The greatest cruelty that can be inflicted on children is to refuse to let them express their anger and suffering except at the risk of losing their parents' love and affection.

If the repression stays unresolved, the parents' childhood tragedy is unconsciously continued on in their children.

No longer to be compelled to betray one's own feelings and senses, no longer to allow oneself to be deflected from the truth of facts by ideologies of any kind, is already to lend a hand in the demolition of the inhuman, destructive wall of silence—the wall that we were forced to respect as children and which has again and again resulted in fascist behavior.

My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents' behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all.

Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grow out of the experience of love.

It is above all the children already born that have a right to life—a right to coexistence with adults in a world in which, with or without the help of the church, violence against children has been unequivocally outlawed. Until such legislation exists, talk of the right to life remains not only a mockery of humanity but a contribution to its destruction.

Once we realize the immense amount of energy children can summon up in order to survive cruelty and extreme sadism, things suddenly start looking more optimistic. Then it is easy to imagine that our world could be a much better one if those children (like Rimbaud, Schiller, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche) could expend their almost limitless energies on other, more productive ends than merely fighting for their own survival.

When children are born, what they need most from their parents is love, by which I mean affection, attention, care, protection, kindness, and the willingness to communicate.