Grown Children Quotes

Here we are, all these years later, standing back and watching our grown children have their lives - through ordinary times, through heartbreak and anguish. But even after horrible events, we are sometimes blessed with a moment of unexpected joy. We learn to grasp, to hold tightly to these moments for the short time they exist. ~ Frances Itani

My grandfather asked whether the country had "come to the point in our life as a nation where the Governor of a great state - one who perhaps aspires to the nomination for President of the United States - can desert a good wife, [the] mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the Governor." Clearly Prescott Bush was not afraid to express his beliefs. I can only imagine what he would say if he saw what our society looks like today. ~ George W. Bush

As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all. ~ Anne Lamott

John felt grounded again. He remembered his favorite Bible story, the one about Peter getting out of the boat and walking on water. The big fisherman was walking along quite nicely until he looked at the waves and began to sink. As much as possible, John tried to live his life without looking at the waves. But when he did, when the lives of his grown children caused his faith to waver even a little, God always sent someone to illustrate the words of Christ: "You of little faith . . . why did you doubt?" John felt certain that in this, his most trying season yet, the Lord had sent Pastor Mark to fill that role. It was a certainty that kept his eyes where they belonged - off the waves and straight ahead to the outstretched arms of Jesus. ~ Karen Kingsbury

The creative adult is the child who has survived. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A grown child is a dangerous thing. ~ Alice Walker

My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school. ~ Anthony Marra

A Lake Charles-based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally's very dear friend and worl-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both woman had joined sororities at LSU. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other's houses. Each loved the other's children. Shirley knew Sally's parents and even consulted Sally's mother when the two go to "fussing to much." They exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts and jointly scoured the newspaper for notices of upcoming cultural events they had, when they were neighbors in Lake Charles, attended together. One day when I was staying as Shirley's overnight guest in Opelousas, I noticed a watercolor picture hanging on the guestroom wall, which Sally had painted as a gift for Shirley's eleven-year-old daughter, who aspired to become a ballerina. With one pointed toe on a pudgy, pastel cloud, the other lifted high, the ballerina's head was encircled by yellow star-like butterflies. It was a loving picture of a child's dream--one that came true. Both women followed the news on TV--Sally through MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and Shirley via Fox News's Charles Krauthammer, and each talked these different reports over with a like-minded husband. The two women talk by phone two or three times a week, and their grown children keep in touch, partly across the ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

One didn't issue instructions to comets. Grown children did what they had to do, and parents could only grit their teeth and watch and pray for them to get through it. ~ Lisa Alther

see who got caught. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them young. When she's not writing, Carolyn likes to sit in her gorgeous backyard with her cats, Chester Fat Boy and Boots Randolph Terminator Outlaw, and watch them protect their territory from crickets, locusts, and spiders. ~ Carolyn Brown

Anyone who's a parent dreads that call in the middle of the night. I have four grown children and I still dread it. ~ Tony Dungy

The Family and Medical Leave Act, for example, only entitles spouses, grown children, and parents to take time off to care for a sick loved one. If a childless single person falls ill, only her parents have the legal right to take off work to care for her. If they're deceased or not up to the task, she's out of luck. Even if she has a sister, niece, or best friend willing to take a leave, they won't be legally entitled to do so. No one has the right to care for her. ~ Sara Eckel

In those minutes, he pretended that they were his parents, and he was home for the weekend from law school to visit them, and this was his room, and the next day he would get up and do whatever it was that grown children did with their parents. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

One of the most common reasons people renovate their homes is a change in their lifestyle - an upcoming wedding, a new baby, or grown children moving away. ~ Candice Olson

If just for one week in the South would show them some simple, impartial courtesy. I wonder what would happen. Do you think it'd give 'em airs or the beginnings of self-respect? Have you ever been snubbed, Atticus? Do you know how it feels? No, don't tell me they're children and don't feel it: I was a child and felt it, so grown children must feel, too. A real good snub, Atticus, makes you feel like you're too nasty to associate with people. How they're as good as they are now is a mystery to me, after a hundred years of systematic denial that they are human. I wonder what kind of miracle we could work with a week's decency. ~ Harper Lee

Children judge each other harshly, but don't make nice distinctions among the grown. ~ Bill Holm

Parents need much wisdom in relating to their grown children - and much prayer. Children likewise have much to learn about relating to their parents as the years pass. ~ Billy Graham

I have two children. They're grown children. I don't think they particularly enjoy it when I'm in a dangerous situation, but they also understand that this is something I feel strongly about. It's what I've done my whole life. ~ Martha Raddatz

Today women live long into their children's adult lives ... too little is made of the pleasure we women feel in conversing with our grown children, and in allowing ourselves, from time to time, to think of them as friends. I have been fortunate in having children with whom conversation is possible; the sheerest pleasure here, for me, has been in meeting with them each alone ... [p. 185] ~ Carolyn G. Heilbrun

I heard the gunshots. I was worried. Guns don't always mean the one holding them won."
Steven hugged her close. "Do you remember what I said to you the day we were married?"
"You said, 'I will always come back to you.'"
"I always will."
Sleep took them then, and whisked them away to their happiest dreams. Heather dreamed of the spring, a Fresh Earth many years away, and she was surrounded by her grown children and grandchildren. Steven dreamed of summer, and beer kept cold in the deeps of Deadbuck Creek, and his wife dancing in the high grass with flowers in her hair. ~ Michael Kanuckel

I understand the sensitivities of grown children with little ones of their own!! They'll turn away a mother full of advice, but they'll never say no to one holding a mop. ~ Cathy Guisewite

Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more. ~ Donna Tartt

I love

how grown children
will still
name

their mothers
the
most
beautiful.

It is
as though,

their eyes
have met
the cascading
curves

and golden
silhouettes
of every
woman.

Yet
their souls
still
drum

to the beat
of their
mother's
warmth
and care. ~ A Starry Eyed April

I love the energy of children. It makes me feel young. I'm just drawn to them. They're like magic to me. And they're drawn to me, the childlike part of me that never did grow up. ~ Dolly Parton

I will never let you know how much you hurt me
No, I will never tell you
The lasts few months have sent me into myself
It's not easy to forget you
Time is healing me
I keep my feelings to myself, it helps
I don't understand you or your kind
I end up getting myself messed up
I can't take any more beatings like this ~ Henry Rollins

It's never going to stop,' Malenfant whispered. 'It will consume the Solar System, the stars - '
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually -
'The future has gone,' Malenfant said. 'My God. That's what this means, isn't it? The downstream can't happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...' That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. 'Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future - '
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
'What is?'
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum - remnants of our universe - isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like -
'Like black holes.' And in that instant, Malenfant understood. 'That's what this is for. This is just a better way of making black ~ Stephen Baxter

I had grown accustomed to living within myself. I was resigned to the knowledge that I had lost all appreciation of the outside world, that the loss of its bright colors was an inseparable part of the loss of my childhood, and that, in a certain sense, one had to pay for freedom and maturity of the soul with the renunciation of this cherished aura. But now, overjoyed, I saw that all this had only been buried or clouded over and that it was still possible - even if you had become liberated and had renounced your childhood happiness - to see the world shine and to savor the delicious thrill of the child's vision. ~ Hermann Hesse

We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not. ~ Elie Wiesel

Children who plan their own schedules and evaluate their own work build up their brains and learn to take more responsibility. ~ Bruce Feiler

I have a girlfriend, Kayn. Her name is Chloe. She just doesn't know it yet, He smiled; he couldn't help himself, he knew it irritated her to no end. (The Children of Ankh series) ~ Kim Cormack

To his children, Will showed the same love he had always shown to her, fierce and unyielding. And the same protectiveness he had only ever showed to one other person: the person James had been named after. Will's parabatai, Jem. ~ Cassandra Clare

Our job is to ask questions of children so that children internalize these questions and ask them of themselves and their own emerging drafts. ~ Lucy Calkins

Look for the hand that points the way,
And take the path where children play.
Then where the face with breath that sighs
Bends to admire its gleaming eyes,
You way is marked by lines of light
That mean escape from endless night. ~ Emily Rodda

Children must be taught mathematics well in anywhere under every condition at every age and so we can have more rational, more logical societies! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

You have driven me from the East to this place, and I have been here two thousand years or more ... My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land. I wish to be an old man here ... I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father. Though he would give me a million dollars or more I would not give to him this land ... When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us ... My children have been exterminated; my brother has been killed. ~ Standing Bear

Hundreds, thousands, aye, millions of human beings, men, women and children, wander the streets of our cities and the highways of our country, hungry, ragged and cold, vainly seeking in this land of plenty, where physical want should be unknown. ~ Victoria Woodhull

In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on. ~ George Eliot

Tell me," he whispered, "why it is you alone hold no fear of me?"
"I can't imagine. Surely I am foolish. Aelfa assures me you eat small children every morn to break your fast. Do you?"
"Nay, I find them to be too harsh on the belly. All that moving around once they're swallowed. Not worth the effort, really."
-Sin & Callie ~ Kinley MacGregor

If a child is off-task ... mayb e the problem is not the child ... maybe it's the task. ~ Alfie Kohn

But since there is but one aim for the entire state, it follows that education must be one and the same for all, and that the responsibility for it must be a public one, not the private affair which it now is, each man looking after his own children and teaching them privately whatever private curriculum he thinks they ought to study. ~ Aristotle.

If we are to save a society in deep trouble, many changes are necessary. In terms of "rights," two changes are mandatory. First, far more Americans need to ask "what is good for society?" before asking "what is good for my group?" Second, we need people to speak up on behalf of the one truly helpless group - children. For this to happen, people must start to think of children as human beings, not as property. ~ Dennis Prager

There's a verse in the Bible: 'Those who are barren have more children than those who give birth.' There are young people all over the world who come to me for advice and love. I have all the children I can handle. ~ Ginger Rogers

I live in a country where we put children in shackles and in concrete cells. Working together, with righteousness and hope, we can create a country that is about reverence and reconciliation, not a world of shackles and concrete cells. ~ Lateefah Simon

Poor children in Baltimore face even worse odds than low-income kids elsewhere, mostly because they remain in impoverished neighborhoods. ~ Gwen Ifill

No more bare bodies in film scenes for me. For my children's sake, I must stop. The other kids at school keep throwing it up to my children, and they are not kind. ~ Ellen Barkin

I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child. ~ Anne Lamott

Young children are important because they contain within themselves the ingredients for learning, in any place and at any time. Parents and teachers are important, too. And that's because they still control the one early learning environment that trumps all the others: the relationship with the growing child. ~ Erika Christakis

The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one's influence wide to learn how to go deep. The world we want for ourselves and our children will not emerge from electronic speed but rather from a spiritual stillness that takes root in our souls. Then, and only then, will we create a world that reflects the heart instead of shattering it. ~ Marianne Williamson

A wish is a dish that's a lot like a fish: Once it's been eaten it's harder to throw back. - Mr. Rakshasas ~ P.B. Kerr

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don't simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and worry about your own wife and children, you are burdened with experiencing the emotional states of multitudes of others you don't know. ~ M.J. Rose

'The Big Girls' has always seemed to me to be a story about different kinds of families - a divorced mother with a child; a father with his child and his girlfriend; a mother of three children, suffering from postpartum depression; and the rigid artificial families maintained by women in prison - all potentially perilous. ~ Susanna Moore

For there was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe, - lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove most of them mad, - there was, to men, a voice audible; voice from the heart of things once more, as if to say: "Lying is not permitted in this Universe. The wages of lying, you behold, are death. Lying means damnation in this Universe; and Beelzebub, never so elaborately decked in crowns and mitres, is NOT God!" This was a revelation truly to be named of the Eternal, in our poor Eighteenth Century; and has greatly altered the complexion of said Century to the Historian ever since. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Young children were always so important to me. Adults should treat children with more respect. We should put more monies in our schools. I grew up on that side of the coin. ~ Steve Wozniak

Abortion is green! I think its irrefutable, but people don't want to hear that. For most people, having children is an instinctual, natural desire and the last thing they want to do is believe that it has any detrimental side, or if they do believe it, they think it's different for them because they live in a gated community or whatever the reason ... ~ Doug Stanhope

The clown has great importance as part of the search for what is laughable and ridiculous in man. We should put the emphasis on the rediscovery of our own individual clown, the one that has grown-up within us and which society does not allow us to express. ~ Jacques Lecoq

At one A.M. we are learning over a bar, Jim and I, and I am stressing the primary importance of the wish. Not knowing what we want, not wishing for it , keeps us navigating along peripheries and tributaries formed and shaped by external influences. I said: Forget about the probable and improbable. Just a few hours ago I met Shirley Clark. She had no money at all but wanted to go to India. She is a film maker. The wish was the orientation. When an offer came to make a film about French children for UNESCO, she accepted, and it led to her being asked to make film on an Indian dancer. Her wish, for years, was the beacon. The probable and improbable are only negative concepts we have to transcend, not accept. ~ Anais Nin

When we commit violence against an infant girl, we call it child abuse; when we commit violence against an infant boy, we call it circumcision. ~ Warren Farrell

Calico Kitty

My calico kitty
was painted and primed
she could prowl
the night away ~
without spending a dime... ~ Muse

I've always hate child stars, starting from way back when, when I was a child. The first child star I saw was Shirley Temple. She was six years old, two foot six and the biggest star in Hollywood. She wore ribbons in her hair, and frilly little pinafores and shiny patent-leather tap shoes - just like the boys in Glee do. ~ Joan Rivers

I steeled myself for this interaction. Fact: I knew I could talk to people. Fact: Children were little people. Little, scary people. I took solace in the fact that if this demonstration went horribly wrong, I could probably outrun them. ~ Conor Grennan

The achievement of freedom is hardly possible without the felt mourning. This ability to mourn, i.e, to give up the illusion of a happy childhood, can restore vitality and creativity if a person is able to experience that he was never loved as a child for what he was, but for his achievements, success and good qualities. And that he sacrificed his childhood for this love, this will shake him very deeply. ~ Alice Miller

Every antique farm-house and moss-grown cottage is a picture. ~ Washington Irving

I've always said there are four words that every child in the world knows, and those are, "Tell me a story,." Even the people who wrote the Bible knew that. They told stories, like the story of Noah. ~ Don Hewitt

Daniel observed her from afar, and tried in vain to conceal the hunger in his eyes. She showed none of the disdain against the Indians that he had encountered from whites back east. Aimee was genuinely warm and friendly with these people who were like family to him. She obviously loved children. She played games with the younger ones, and each time she held Elk Runner's infant in her arms, a new wave of desire spread through him. He tried not to think about what it would be like to see her holding a child, their child, in her arms. That could never happen. His white mother had died in this wilderness, giving birth to him. No matter how she dressed, or her abilities on the trail, Aimee was still a white woman. Like a beautiful spring flower, she would wither and die in these mountains. Neither lasted long in this harsh environment. ~ Peggy L. Henderson

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning. ~ Maya Angelou

Defining freedom cannot amount to simply substituting it with inclusion. Countering the criminalization of Black girls requires fundamentally altering the relationship between Black girls and the institutions of power that have worked to reinforce their subjugation. History has taught us that civil rights are but one component of a larger movement for this type of social transformation. Civil rights may be at the core of equal justice movements, and they may elevate an equity agenda that protects our children from racial and gender discrimination, but they do not have the capacity to fully redistribute power and eradicate racial inequity. There is only one practice that can do that. Love. ~ Monique Morris

I believe in love, children and being a good person. ~ Leighton Meester

Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids. ~ Leo Buscaglia

You can't listen to what people who aren't musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don't want to hear, 'Your kid is ugly.' But I knew the record was good and it would sell. ~ Brian McKnight

The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group. ~ Seamus Heaney