Molding A Child Quotes

I know a woman
who keeps buying puzzles
chinese
puzzles
blocks
wires
pieces that finally fit
into some order.
she works it out
mathmatically
she solves all her
puzzles
lives down by the sea
puts sugar out for the ants
and believes
ultimately
in a better world.
her hair is white
she seldom combs it
her teeth are snaggled
and she wears loose shapeless
coveralls over a body most
women would wish they had.
for many years she irritated me
with what I considered her
eccentricities-
like soaking eggshells in water
(to feed the plants so that
they'd get calcium).
but finally when I think of her
life
and compare it to other lives
more dazzling, original
and beautiful
I realize that she has hurt fewer
people than anybody I know
(and by hurt I simply mean hurt).
she has had some terrible times,
times when maybe I should have
helped her more
for she is the mother of my only
child
and we were once great lovers,
but she has come through
like I said
she has hurt fewer people than
anybody I know,
and if you look at it like that,
well,
she has created a better world.
she has won.
Frances, this poem is for
you. ~ Charles Bukowski

A child should learn from early on what kind of activity supported his daily life, and he should appreciate the importance of labor. Tengo ~ Haruki Murakami

Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book ... That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart form the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society's technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader, to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic. ~ Martha V. Parravano

Short version: For the child ... , it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow ... It is more important to pave the way for a child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts that he is not ready to assimilate. ~ Rachel Carson

When you are a child of the mountains yourself, you really belong to them. You need them. They become the faithful guardians of your life. If you cannot dwell on their lofty heights all your life, if you are in trouble, you want at least to look at them. ~ Maria Franziska Von Trapp

As a child, I was taught that it was bad manners to bring attention to yourself, and to never, ever make a spectacle of yourself ... all of which I've earned a living doing. ~ Audrey Hepburn

Every child has a right to education as much as to life, and every woman the right to live. ~ Nita Ambani

I was always spiritual, even as a child. I was taught to pray, show gratitude. We had an attitude of gratitude. Even if life was ugly, bad or sad - we prayed. ~ Shilpa Shetty

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don't believe that old people can feel that they are orphans. ~ Agnes Varda

I will say this about the upper echelon in France: they know how to spend money. From what I saw living in America, wealth is dedicated to elevating the individual experience. If you're a well-off child, you get a car, or a horse. You go to summer camps that cost as much as college. And everything is monogrammed, personalized, and stamped, to make it that much easier for other people to recognize your net worth.



…The French bourgeois don't pine for yachts or garages with multiple cars. They don't build homes with bowling alleys or spend their weekends trying to meet the quarterly food and beverage limit at their country clubs: they put their savings into a vacation home that all their family can enjoy, and usually it's in France. They buy nice food, they serve nice wine, and they wear the same cashmere sweaters over and over for years. I think the wealthy French feel comfortable with their money because they do not fear it. It's the fearful who put money into houses with even bedrooms and fifteen baths. It's the fearful who drive around in yellow Hummers during high-gas-price months becasue if they're going to lose their money tomorrow, at least other people will know that they are rich today. The French, as with almost all things, privilege privacy and subtlety and they don't feel comfortable with excess. This is why one of their favorite admonishments is tu t'es laisse aller. You've lost control of yourself. You've let yourself go. ~ Courtney Maum

Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number
counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering! ~ Cynthia Ozick

A child starts from nothing and advances alone. It is the child's reason about which the sensitive periods revolve. The reason provides the initial force and energy, and a child absorbs his first images to assist the reason and act on it. ~ Maria Montessori

It was like a child addressing a tidal wave, saying, I will not be moved - and before the words are out of his mouth, all is ocean, leaving no sign; not only no sign of the child, but no sign of his defiance, no sign that anything opposed the crushing sea in the least, no eddy, no swirl, no detritus, only simple, plain, indisputable nothingness. ~ Brent Weeks

I have never understood, for example, how come a child can climb up on the roof, scale the TV antenna, and rescue the cat ... yet cannot walk down the hallway without grabbing both walls with his grubby hands for balance. ~ Erma Bombeck

I say to my child, I will explain to you as much of life as I can, but you must remember that there is a part of life for which you are the explanation. ~ Robert Breault

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived. ~ John Le Carre

Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books. ~ Richard Peck

My personality has not once altered under outside influence." "Then I'm genuinely appalled, and your childhood nannies have my intense sympathy. You've got a bit of a nerve, don't you think, accusing other people of vanity? You make Mr. Darcy look like the poster child for low self-esteem. ~ Lucy Parker

For to us a child is born,
for to us a son is given,
and the government shall be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
- Isaiah 9:6 ~ Anonymous

Funnel

The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost-new
grand pianos. He left a considerable estate
when he died. The children honored their
separate arts; two became moderately famous,
three married and fattened their delicate share
of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was
a concert pianist. She had a notable career
and wore cropped hair and walked like a man,
or so I heard when prying a childhood car
into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan.
One died a pinafore child, she stays her five
years forever. And here is one that wrote-
I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive
words and scratch out my short marginal notes
and finger my accounts.
back from that great-grandfather I have come
to tidy a country graveyard for his sake,
to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun
and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake.
I like best to think of that Bunyan man
slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale
for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan
of culture to do it big. On this same scale
he built seven arking houses and they still stand.
One, five stories up, straight up like a square
box, still dominates its coastal edge of land.
It is rented cheap in the summer musted air
to sneaker-footed families who pad through
its ro ~ Anne Sexton

Shockingly, too many of our children don't read to grade level. Studies show that if a child does not read to grade level by third grade, that child is likely to drop out of school. I believe the love of reading begins at home. We should do all we can to make sure that our children and grandchildren stay in school and graduate. Reading to grade level is an important foundation. ~ Soraya Diase Coffelt

Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world. ~ Bette Davis

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence. Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference. ~ Maria Montessori

I don't think Jennifer and I are really at the child stage yet. We have been discussing a nice house plant. If we don't kill that, then in a few years, we might try a fish. ~ Sophie Oak

If you know someone who has lost a child, and you're afraid to mention
them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that
they died
you're not reminding them. They didn't forget they died. What
you're reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived, and
... that is a great gift. ~ Elizabeth Edwards

Beautiful is that girl who always loved you more than you expected, who helps people, who taught you right from the wrong. A mother who bears the child in her womb for nine months and becoming a mother is beauty. That is the real beauty. ~ Jyoti Patel

I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married. ~ Doris Lessing

Precollege program orientation was scheduled for two days after Watson arrived, and I discovered a few things in the meantime.
1. My uncle Leander has a memory like a steel trap. He took Watson and I to the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet around the corner from our flat, to the antiquarian bookshop to look at first editions of Faulkner, to the teahouse painted to look like a starry night, all of which Watson had mentioned in passing that he loved, and whose repetition now left Watson in a state of expansive joy.
2. I should have found this delightful. I did not. As, throughout all of this, Leander referred to Watson as my boyfriend.
2b. Loudly.
2c. He did this as often as he could.
2d. To wit: "A latte for my niece and her young man"; "Charlotte, wasn't that your Jamie's favorite, A Light in August? Faulkner's later work -"; "Child, go and get your boyfriend another napkin, we aren't barbarians/" And then that smile Leander had, something like a wolf after eating a fat peasant child. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

As a child, I actually wanted to be a lawyer. That was the goal. I didn't plan to be an author, and then even less, did I plan to produce movies. It all just happened. ~ Stephenie Meyer

I know what I liked as a child, and I don't do any book that I, as a child, wouldn't have liked. ~ H. A. Rey

Night terrors are in deep sleep, and they're more common in kids, as are nightmares, but what happens in a night terror is like a flash - we think a flash of some image or something happens in the brain. We don't really quite know what. And it usually ends up with the child screaming almost like screaming bloody murder. It's very scary for the parents or whoever else is around. ~ Shelby Harris

But if you were going to change the chain of events that killed your child, where would you begin? How far back would you go? All the way back to their birth? And how many times had you saved your child's life without even realizing how close you'd just come to disaster, to being one link too late in a chain of events that would wrap around your neck and choke you forever? How close had you come to knowing this place - the place where you collapse on your knees with one fist in your belly and the other clutching a blue GAP bag containing your baby's ruined clothes, the place from which there is no going back? ~ Kelly Kittel

[Reacher] knew people with houses. He had talked to them, with the same kind of detached interest he would talk to a person who kept snakes as pets or entered ballroom dancing competitions. ~ Lee Child

The ship had come sweeping in over a dark and somber landscape, a terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its parent sun, Sol, that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars of the mind of an abandoned child. ~ Douglas Adams

That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game - melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseperable from them. It wasn't a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow.
Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.
Happy is the wrong word. Important. ~ Margaret Atwood

I fell for her in summer, my lovely summer girl,
From summer she is made, my lovely summer girl,
I'd love to spend a winter with my lovely summer girl,
But I'm never warm enough for my lovely summer girl,
It's summer when she smiles, I'm laughing like a child,
It's the summer of our lives; we'll contain it for a while
She holds the heat, the breeze of summer in the circle of her hand
I'd be happy with this summer if it's all we ever had. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

May there not be some subconscious jealousy that motivates our reactions to other people? Why do we eat chocolate sundaes when we know that we should reduce? Are we free from the influence of parental training? The Scriptures say, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Parental training and all education proceed on the assumption that the will is not free, but can be trained, motivated, and directed. Finally, beyond both physiology and psychology there is God. Can we be sure that he is not directing our choices? Do we know that we are free from his grace? The Psalm says, "Blessed is the man whom you choose and cause to approach you." Is it certain that God has not caused us to choose to approach him? Can we set a limit to God's power? Can we tell how far it extends and just where it ends? Are we outside his control? ~ Gordon H. Clark

I'll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else
and the one time I did it was took from me
they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby ... I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left. ~ Toni Morrison

It means food on every table, every child in school, a job for everybody and a house with toilet and electricity for every family. This can be achieved through unity. Unity strengthens us. Division weakens us. ~ Narendra Modi

A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back. ~ Arthur Miller

Ordinary" has to be one of the loneliest words in our vocabulary today. Who wants a bumper sticker that announces to the neighborhood, "My child is an ordinary student at Bubbling Brook Elementary"? Who wants to be that ordinary person who lives in an ordinary town, is a member of an ordinary church, and has ordinary friends and works an ordinary job? Our life has to count! We have to leave our mark, have a legacy, and make a difference. And all of this should be something that can be managed, measured, and maintained. We have to live up to our Facebook profile. It's one of the newer versions of salvation by works. ~ Michael S. Horton

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher. ~ Elbert Hubbard

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder. ~ Nick Bostrom

I'm going to make the wildly unfounded assumption that Satara's dead by your hand and not Tory's. Now, stay with me on this, Cajun. My father slit my throat and murdered my wife because he thought I'd betrayed him by getting married. Before that, he loved me more than his life and I was his last surviving child. His second in command. Now what do you think he's going to do to you once he sees her body? I can assure you, it won't be a fun-filled trip to Chuck E. Cheese. (Urian) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Yesterday I saw a child wearing a T-shirt that said, "If you love me, don't feed me junk food." I was delighted to see this, but I also know how difficult it can be to feed our children well, particularly when the foods that are most convenient and the most heavily advertised are often the ones we should avoid. Joel Fuhrman's new book is a blessing, because it makes it so much easier. It is excellent, and full of clarity, wisdom, and guidance you can trust. It can indeed give you the power to shape your child's health destiny - John Robbins ~ Joel Fuhrman

I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, 'Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch.' ~ J.K. Rowling

Parents can shape a child, but a great teacher can, too. ~ Susanne Bier

The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases. ~ Eugene O'Neill

If we could somehow end child abuse and neglect, the eight hundred pages of DSM (and the need for the easier explanations such as DSM-IV Made Easy: The Clinician's Guide to Diagnosis) would be shrunk to a pamphlet in two generations. ~ John Briere