A child from the age of 2 or 3 absorbs what is in the environment and what generates hatred for anyone perceived to be different.
Every word, facial expression, gesture, or action on the part of a parent gives the child some message about self-worth. It is sad that so many parents don’t realize what messages they are sending.
It takes three to make a child.
I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn’t speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, ‘What? That’s your son.’
In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.
Since I was a child, death is definitely something that I think about every day. But I think that everybody does. You try and avoid it, but it’s such a big thing that you can’t.
The child who concentrates is immensely happy.
I had three miscarriages, then, at forty-eight, a child with serious developmental difficulties. He is a blessing and a jewel. He is my teacher. From him I get and give unconditional love.
Violence is violence. Trauma is trauma. And we are taught to downplay it, even think about it as child’s play.
I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn’t know what was ahead of me.
The doors between the old man today and the child are still open, wide open. I can stroll through my grandmother’s house and know exactly where the pictures are, the furniture was, how it looked, the voice, the smells. I can move from my bed at night today to my childhood in less than a second.
At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story. A young mother and a dutiful father with their baby were joined by poor shepherds and visitors from afar. They came with their gifts to worship the Christ child.
When you lose a child in an accident as I did, it’s final – you’re not caught in this longing for him, to search for him, knowing he’s out there some place.
You may feel powerless as a child, but the world will one day be yours. And you’re responsible for it. So, seize the day and take charge of it.
The depth of the love of parents for their children cannot be measured. It is like no other relationship. It exceeds concern for life itself. The love of a parent for a child is continuous and transcends heartbreak and disappointment.
One seeks to equip the child with deeper, more gripping, and subtler ways of knowing the world and himself.
When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It’s a slur on the divine in our nature.
The formula for achieving middle-class success is simple: Finish high school; don’t have a child before the age of 20; and get married before having the child.
I always said if it gets to a point where I really want a child, I would adopt; kids are amazing, so I’m getting the selfish stuff out of my system so when I have them I can say, ‘Go, run. I have plenty of money, go play.’
I love to be alone, and I did as a child as well, especially if I was outside.
For a small child there is no division between playing and learning; between the things he or she does just for fun and things that are educational. The child learns while living and any part of living that is enjoyable is also play.
I would like to think of myself as destiny’s child.
There’s this idea that at the lowest rungs of the social ladder in an African family is a childless woman – and the lowest rung of all is a motherless child.
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.
It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.
It’s not difficult to take care of a child; it’s difficult to do anything else while taking care of a child. Trying to clean up the kitchen after you’ve had a baby is a nightmare because you have to wait for the baby to be asleep, you’re exhausted, and you really don’t want to clean up the kitchen now.
A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.
As a child, it was really hard because I’d be thrown into a new school and have to make new friends, or I’d sit in class for months without speaking the language, but as I got older, I welcomed the possibility of discovering new cultures and languages.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
Dumbness comes from the fact that a child is born deaf and that it consequently never learns how to articulate, for it is by the medium of hearing that such instruction is acquired.
Every child matters. If we fail our children, we are bound to fail our present, our future, faith, cultures, and civilisations as well.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
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.
Time goes by so slowly when you’re a child, and then, as an adult, it goes by in the blink of an eye.
Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
It’s very important that young artists push boundaries, because sometimes you have this urge to do something – like the impulsive and dangerous urges I had as a child – and if you don’t follow through with it you might miss out on a developmental experience.
Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts.
Whatever China I’d been born into, I would probably still have become a painter – I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn’t been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.
I set our house on fire when I was a little child playing with lighters. Boy, did I burn the place down!
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around 20,000 pounds. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
Health care is not a privilege. It’s a right. It’s a right as fundamental as civil rights. It’s a right as fundamental as giving every child a chance to get a public education.
I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.
I had been taught that if I cried, to be quiet about it, so whereas I never howled, the least thing made me cry both at school and at home. Crying tends to separate a child from other children, for even children dislike a cry baby, and I had no friends in the world.
Genius is sorrow’s child.
I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.
I had lots of trouble in school as a child, and I lost confidence. Teachers thought I was stupid. I learned to read very late, when I was 11. Dyslexia wasn’t recognized then, and the assumption was you were incapable of thinking.
You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.
The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought. The movies were my escape.
Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.
Growing up in Hollywood it seemed like every kid was the child of some star. We had no idea that other people would think we were special, because there was no other lifestyle to compare it to.
Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.
The quality of life is so different in France. There is the possibility of living a simple life. I would never contemplate raising my daughter in LA. I would never raise any child there.
