Children Quotes - Page 775

The "brightness" of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.

The stultifying effect of the movies is not that the children see them but that their parents do, as if Hollywood provided a plausible adult recreation to grow up into.

Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.

Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.

I think there's some evidence that when it comes to being a doctor or nurse, a police officer or therapist, that empathetic engagement leads to burn-out. Imagine if you're dealing with severely ill children, and you felt their pain all the time, and the pain of their parents - you wouldn't be able to do that job for very long. It would kill you.

I think there's some evidence that we're empathic by nature. There is some evidence from studies of babies and young children that they resonate with the pain of others, and there's some work by Frans de Waal that other primates also resonate with the pain of others.

So the actual privilege is that you can then take time off - and if you don't, you're a fool. You're earning all this money to support children whom you then don't see, which is absurd.

When I became a father acting sort of took the place of what I did in my free time and my children became the main focus. I play a lot and my children play. Both my sons - my daughter's still too young really - have surpassed me with their music skills, which is wildly irritating.

It is a painful reminder that even the most well-intentioned among us sometimes act in ways that put children in danger of being abused or neglected.

What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.

What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out and shot every day? Everything would be different - even after the war ended, my future would be very different. Look at what these poor people in Aleppo are going through. The children, the ones who survive, are going to be absolutely altered by what they live through, and you and I, luckily, have never had to deal with that.

My children haven't read 'Winter Journal'. They have read some of my work, but I really don't foist it on them. I want them to be free to discover it in their own good time. I think reading an intimate memoir by your father - or an intimate autobiographical work, whatever we want to call this thing - you have to come at it at the right moment, so I'm certainly not foisting it upon them.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.

Germany's population is getting older and older and smaller and smaller. To be able to finance our welfare system over the long term, we need more women in the workforce, more children and more immigrants.

Your child can die from chickenpox.

I think it's hard for any parent to see anything negative said or done against your child and, when you can't directly do something about it, it's hard.

I'd like to adopt an older child, maybe 5 years old.

I really want to adopt a child... I want to be called 'Mom.' It really is the most beautiful word in the English language.

I was so unhealthy as a child, and at least three or four times my parents were told to get ready, that I would not make it.

A lullaby should be timeless because it's a timeless concept - the birth of the child.

When I was working on the lyrics, I thought of all the lullabies we learn as children: "Away in the Manger," William Blake's lullabies. I realized that the key to lullabies is simplicity.

As a child I was such an intense daydreamer; I could be so gone that I had to be smacked to come back. They were really worried that I had some kind of catatonia or something because I would go so far out. Because all I wanted to do was talk to god as a child.