Children Quotes - Page 379

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.

Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.

Many of us are trying to lead multiple lives: child, mother, wife, lover, star, giving small doses of oxygen to each and imploding under the weight of so many competing roles. The women I have written in Bombshells struggle - sometimes hilariously, sometimes tragically - to bridge the chasm between the wilderness of their inner worlds and the demands of their outer worlds. And humour, in the end, is our saviour.

Grandchildren can be annoying - how many times can you go: "And the cow goes moo and the pig goes oink"? It's like talking to a supermodel.

Surrogacy used to be difficult, because the woman that was carrying the child was biologically related to the child. And sometimes you can still do it that way, but you do not have to do it that way anymore.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Don't live vicariously through your kids or try to shape them into who you wanted to be, like the popular kid or an athlete. Children should be given the opportunity to be themselves.

since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

One thing America truly does stand for is a million different ways of living. But while we enjoy the lives we have, we're so privileged. We live in a world that's so far from what the Palestinian children are going through, it's unbelievable. Yet if we dare to get close to that atrocity and name it, it would shock us so badly we couldn't live in our privileged comfort zone.

My mother insisted that her children read.

Learn to get excited like a child. There is nothing that has more magic than childish excitement.

There's something really magical about having a child - it's like permission to begin again, start over, reevaluate some things, check yourself. Recognize yourself.

Back in my mid-20s I was told I'd never be able to have children as I wasn't having periods. Doctors tried to start up my monthly cycles, but when nothing worked, they actually offered me a hysterectomy. Without it, they said I might get ovarian cancer in the future. I chose not to have the operation, and am so glad I didn't.

Good heredity and environment are necessary. You cannot compare the child of a savage with the child of a civilized person.

If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour - whether that neighbour is near or very far away - forget about meditation.

If people who say they love their children meant it, would there be war? And would there be division of nationalities - would there be these separations?

No one who traces the history of motherhood, of the home, of child-rearing practices will ever assume the eternal permanence of our own way of institutionalizing them.

Given the reality of unintended parenthood and parental unhappiness, one would think that women and men who make the decision not to have children - who are deliberate and thoughtful about the choice to bring another person into the world - would be seen as less selfish than those who unthinkingly have children. Yet the stigma remains.

So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space.

There can be no better measure of our governance than the way we treat our children, and no greater failing on our part than to allow them to be subjected to violence, abuse or exploitation.

The trick in writing children's books is to set up danger, mystery and excitement on page one. Force the kid to turn the page . . . Then in the middle of each chapter there's a dramatic point of excitement, and at chapter's end, a cliffhanger.

Receiving both the Coretta Scott King - Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award suggests I have succeeded, at least in terms of my own goals, in my intent to make art that moves children.

Though the blame cannot be placed entirely on publishers, I do think a more diverse pool of editors would go a long way toward broadening the perspective. Our role is to work together to create books that act as wide-open doors - books that allow all children to walk through and feel safe enough to stay.

There's a really unique relationship between a single parent and their child. Marriages so easily break up. There's kind of this temporary deal about marriages. That's one of the things that makes it stressful, and that's something that's nonexistent in a parent-child relationship.

Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.