child Quotes

“It was nearly a year and a half ago that Jurgis had met Ona, at a horse fair a hundred miles from home. Jurgis had never expected to get married – he had laughed at it as a foolish trap for a man to walk into; but here, without ever having spoken a word to her, with no more than the exchange of half a dozen smiles, he found himself, purple in the face with embarrassment and terror, asking her parents to sell her to him for his wife – and offering his father’s two horses he had been sent to the fair to sell. But Ona’s father proved as a rock – the girl was yet a child, and he was a rich man, and his daughter was not to be had in that way. So Jurgis went home with a heavy heart, and that spring and summer toiled and tried hard to forget. In the fall, after the harvest was over, he saw that it would not do, and tramped the full fortnight’s journey that lay between him and Ona.”

“I don’t care what she is. Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

“An adult child can’t get enough because it’s really a child’s needs that are in question.”

“There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child - you grow up knowing you aren’t allowed to disappoint, you’re not even allowed to die. There isn’t a replacement toddling around; you’re it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.”

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”

“For every woman who juggles a child in her arms, there is one who yearns for the cry of a child to comfort. For every family that fills a home, there are those who will never become parents.”

“A mother cannot give birth to a child and not lose a piece of herself. The child takes a part of the parent with them, holding it as their own. Whether it be their heart or soul, they are now connected for always.”

“I do not like the Tower, of any place.”

“The eyes of a woman in the face of a ten-year-old girl.”

“She did not bow her head in shame. She stood straight, her chin high. She wiped away the tears.”

“When I was 5, he said, my family forgot & left me at the fair. I wandered around in the bright sounds & smells of hot sawdust & cotton candy for hours. It was already too late by the time my parents found me. I haven’t been fit for decent society since.”

“I buried a nickel under the porch when I was 8, she said, but one day my grandma died & they sold the house & I never got to go back for it. A nickel used to mean something, I said.She nodded. It still does, she said & then she started to cry.”

″‘She loved you very much.’ ‘But she left me,’ I told him. ‘She left us,’ said the preacher softly...‘She packed her bags and left us, and she didn’t leave one thing behind.‘”

“I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, “How does a baby grow?” But an American child will ask, “How do you make a baby?” From an early age, we absorb our culture’s arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere “raw material” that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.”

“‘You can go to the rock, Cyril….’ That was what murder was—as easy as that! But afterwards you went on remembering….”

“In profile, he could see both the young woman she was becoming and the little girl he remembered.”

“No one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. ”

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time.”

“He had to slow down, and for the first rime on the long journey, he began to lag behind the group. Stumbling about blindly, he did not notice the group drawing farther and farther ahead of him. As if by magic, Uncle was suddenly at his side.”

“The tears were hot in Salva’s eyes. Where had everyone gone? Why had they left without waking him? He knew the answer: because he was a child . . . who might tire easily and slow them down, and complain about being hungry, and cause trouble somehow.”

″‘Think me — for a change — bad!’ I shall never forget the sweetness and gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything.”

“The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen…”

“You say we could lose our lives for this child? I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.”

″‘Oh, it wasn’t him!’ Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. ‘It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him.’ She paused a moment; then she added: ‘Quint was much too free.’ This gave me, straight from my vision of his face—such a face!—a sudden sickness of disgust. ‘Too free with my boy?’ ‘Too free with everyone!‘”

“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”

“It was a kid. A child. I had a clear view in my scope, but I didn’t fire. I wasn’t going to kill a kid, innocent or not. I’d have to wait until the savage who put him up to it showed himself on the street.”

“There was ... a dreamy feeling that this child was somehow a message come to him from that far-off life.”

“When I was a little girl fairy tales were my favorite books because even before you opened them you knew how they are going to end. Happily ever after.”

″‘Don’t tell me from genetics. What’ve they got to do with it?’ said Crowley. ‘Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you’re going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he’ll grow up to be a demon just because his dad became one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.‘”

“In old days ... angels ... took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction ... the hand may be a little child’s.”

“You’re not average. You’re not ordinary. You’ve been custom-made. You are one of a kind...He looks right at you and says, ‘There’s my masterpiece. That’s my son. That’s my daughter. That’s what brings the most joy to my heart.‘”

In a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes. For some time he had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world.

″ One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, ‘What are you kids doing in there?’ when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn’t but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. ‘I understand and I love you’ without so much as uttering a word.”

“To produce a happy child, as a parent, a teacher, a friend, or a society, is to successfully fulfill a divine function.”

″‘I’m just gonna go ahead and nip this thing in the bud. Cuz you know, they say pregnancy often leads to, you know... an infant.‘”

“You love your child for who the child is, not as an extension of your identity or as an example of your good parenting or even as a companion.”

“Tis true, a child just dropped from its dam may be supported by her milk for a solar year with little other nourishment, at most not above the value of two shillings.”

“The city of happiness, well, we all live there and people go about their business with full knowledge of the child in the closet.”

“I realize that some people will not believe that a child of little more than ten years is capable of having such feelings. My story is not intended for them. I am telling it to those who have a better knowledge of man.”

″‘Dónde está mi mami?’ Enrique cries, over and over. ‘Where is my mom?‘”

“They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do.”

“The mother is nineteen, but she doesn’t feel that old.”

“My mother is so full of joy and life. I am her child, and that is better than being the child of anyone else.

“Instead of promoting healthy development, they unconsciously undermine it, often with the belief that they are acting in their child’s best interest.”

“Leonardo snuck up on the poor, unsuspecting boy.”

“Mama isn’t coming yet. Baby Llama starts to fret.”

“And on that child there is a dog, a dozing dog on a dreaming child on a snoring granny.”

“In the orchard was a cottage, and in this cottage lived Pippi Longstocking. She was nine years old, and she lived all alone. She had neither mother nor father, which was really rather nice, for in this way there was no one to tell her to go to bed just when she was having the most fun, and no one to make her take cod-liver-oil when she felt like eating peppermints.”

“And on that granny there is a child, a dreaming child on a snoring granny”

“My mother used to threaten to tear me into eight piece if I knocked over the water bucket, or pretended not to hear her calling me to come home as the dusk thickened and the cicadas’s shrilling increased. I would hear her voice, brought and fierce, echoing through the lonely valley. “Where is that wretched boy? I will tear him apart when he gets back.”

Tender and lyrical prose, gentle and almost achingly poignant moments and a golden daffy-down-dilly air pervading the stories: make sure you grab your tissue box before reading the Kingdom of Silk series.

Equating willfulness with being special, the child then confronts other themes of life such as eternity and loneliness. The cat declares that he is immortal. The girl concludes that they are both willful. As the girl identifies with the cat they discuss some of life’s themes. Loneliness is seen in the mailman and dog. The girl attempts to show empathy, but the cat will have none of that. He does not show compassion and is irritated that the girl will not follow his lead in being pitiless.

“To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child. He has realized this. And he doesn’t want to become a grown-up like that.”

“Any child who has ever experienced a moment of self-doubt will be both reassured and delighted by this heartwarming tale of two very different friends and their ability to help one another feel more complete.”

“Little Bear’s mother turned around to see what on earth could make a noise like kuplunk! ‘Garumpf!’ she cried, choking on a mouthful of berries, ‘This is not my child! Where is Little Bear?’ She took one good look and backed away. (She was old enough to she shy of people, even a very small person like Little Sal.) Then she turned around and walked off very fast to hunt for Little Bear.”

“She was part of you, Alex, and part of me. I wanted her even if you didn’t-”

“He loved his child the way his parents had loved him, but he found that he could not deny her anything.”

“I locked Orual up or laid her asleep as best I could somewhere deep down inside me; she lay curled there. It was like being with child, but reversed; the thing I carried in me grew slowly smaller and less alive.”

“Can’t you see my soul is very old and you’re still a child?”

Alexander Ashbrook, a gifted young aristocrat, is unaware that he even has a son, much less that his child has fallen into -and then been rescued from- the clutches of Otis Gardiner.

“Day by day the prince grew fonder and fonder of her; but he loved her as he would have loved a good child, and had no thought of making her his queen.”

“But in Australia a model child is - I say it not without thankfulness- an unknown quantity. It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the sunny brilliancy, of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and the people are young-hearted together, and the children’s spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years’ sorrowful history.”

“Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses.”

″ I shall not make a favourite of my own child, she thought, especially when all the blame for this lies with him.”

“Would there be room in the boat for me to ride to shore with you?” she begged. “I know it’s silly, but there is America so close to me for the first time in my life – I can’t bear not to set my foot upon it!” “What a child you are, Kit,” smiled Mrs. Eaton. “Sometimes ‘tis hard to believe you are sixteen.”

“They couldn’t help being saddled with her. They tried to make her feel like a member of the family, but they didn’t realize their efforts only showed that she wasn’t. It was quite natural. She simply was no their child. Nothing could change that.”

“I waded around in the diamonds, picked up great handfuls of the jewels letting the smaller ones slip through my fingers. I juggled with two heavy diamonds the size of baseballs. I suddenly felt like a small child let loose in a candy shop.”

“You wouldn’t think there could be another child as naughty as my naughty little sister, would you? But there was...and this boy’s name was Harry.”

“A very long time ago, when I was a little girl, I didn’t have a naughty little sister at all. I was a child all on my own. I had a father and a mother of course, but I hadn’t any other little brothers or sisters - I was quite alone.”

“ ‘I never have cared for red hair,’ Nana said fondly, twisting a strand of Posy’s round her finger. ‘Never could fancy it since I got scratched by a ginger cat as a child. But nicely kept it can be striking.’ ”

″ ‘Oh, Murder! What was that, Papa!’ ‘My child, it was a Motor-Car, A Most Ingenious Toy! Designed to Captivate and Charm Much rather than to rouse Alarm In any English Boy.’ ”

“The little child that lies hidden in us all reached out- as in the dark- for a hand to hold; and there was none.”

“Lord Lundy would begin to cry. A Hint at harmless little jobs Would shake him with convulsive sobs. While as for Revelations, these Would simply bring him to his knees, And leave him whimpering like a child. It drove his Colleagues raving wild!”

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger and suddenly bending to the child’s face he shouted: “Stop!”

“Thou knowest,—for thou hast sympathies which these men lack!—thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother’s rights, and how much the stronger they are, when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter!

“Mother,” said little Pearl, “the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!

“Run away, child,” answered her mother, “and catch the sunshine! It will soon be gone.”