I want to remember warming your two a.m. bottle, clipping your locks, watching you be baptized, bathing you in the big porcelain sink… how I often laid you against my chest and felt the cradlesong of your tiny breaths as you fell asleep . . .
When do you become a man? Becoming a man means doing the right thing even though it may be hard or difficult. Boys do what is easiest. A man does what is right, whether easy or not.
A Good Man. Every night, like a question-and-answer prayer, my son and I recite...What are you going to be? And he says...An honest man. A fair man. A courageous man. And a good man. That's the most important thing, Papa. And my job is finally done. ...
I want to remember...Smelling your newness upon this earth. The baby-Jesus smell as Grandma used to put it. Pure. Unsullied. Like the imagined smell in the twirling air of eiderdown feathers spin-floating around the yard on a new spring day.
Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' They sang; but I, pinnoccio, saw the st...
Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary. He told us to be not only 'as harmless as doves', but also 'as wise as serpents'. He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-m...
I believe that we must align our actions with our highest principles. No matter the outcome, we will not have failed if we act from our best intentions.” “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Captain,” Chakotay said with equal certai...
And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, than I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt, which disappears when you cook with it. I am salt. Without my children, I c...
I truly believe that the children who are diagnosed with cancer are some of the wisest, sweetest, strongest, and most loving children. They have gained a bigger perspective of the world in such a short time. They become wise beyond their years.
Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children. Nobody likes children, Yunior, your mother assured you. That doesn't m...
On the Russian revolutionaries: To leave your parents, faithful and loyal subjects of the Emperor, to leave your profession, to desist from having children, to lose your fortune, and to give up your civil honor, all for revolutionary conviction, make...
Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being trick...
When a baby is born the mother in particular enters into a new larger relationship with the world. She has become connected to all people. She is part of keeping us on earthnot the "us" comprised of individuals but the species itself. By protecting t...
The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well.
I think that one of the benefits of optimism and idealism is that they lead you into things you would never have tried if you'd let yourself imagine how hard it was going to turn out to be.
It all begins, I maintain, with that powerful and underutilized thing called love. God's love for the individual is displayed by those people who reflect his love in their words and deeds. It ultimately gets understood and accepted by the child in po...
Magrat liked to think she was good with children, and worried that she wasn’t. She didn’t like them very much, and worried about this too. Nanny Ogg seemed to be effortlessly good with children by alternately and randomly giving them either a swe...
I was at the annual meeting of a state library association a few years later, when the children were in the process of leaving the nest, and one of the librarians asked me, "What do you think you and Hugh have done which was the best for your childre...
Wealth isn't always measured in dollar signs. We each have time, talent and creativity, all of which can be powerful forces for positive change. Share your blessings in whatever form they come and to whatever level you have been blessed.
(...) us, little children of the dust, children of a day, who with so many burdens do burden us with taking thought and with fears and desires and devious schemings of the mind, so that we wax old before our time and fall weary ere the brief day be s...
For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much ...
