Quotes & Sayings About Family From Children's Books

I struggle to listen, to sit, and to study-
I would rather play and create art with my brushes and putty.

I wish I could focus on things that I know-
Like cars, Mars, and playing with dough. — Brenda Lochinger

The slave labors, but with no cheer-it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment. — Henry Ward Beecher

Reading with my children is incredibly important to me and a wonderful way to spend time together as a family, exploring magical worlds through books and stories. — Frank Lampard

No parent/home/child/teacher/school has an all-round 100 percent wholeness. We all have limitations and problems. But I must never think it is all or nothing.
Perhaps I'd like to live in the country, but I don't. Well, maybe I can get the family to a park two times a week, and out to the country once every two weeks.
Maybe I have to send my child to a not-so-good school. Well, maybe we can read one or two good books together aloud. If you can't give them everything, give them something. — Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Charlotte's dirty dishes haunted her dreams that night. She was running down a dark tunnel and close behind her plates, cups, bowls and crumbs made threatening noises. — Jennifer Lott

Priceless gifts:
The gift of love.
The gift of parent.
The gift of husband
The gift of wife
The gift of children
The gift of prayer.
The gift of family.
The gift of relatives.
The gift of friends.
The gift of in-laws.
The gift of books. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I'm ridiculously proud of my children. More so than any of my books. I suspect I wouldn't have written any of them if I hadn't been lucky enough to have this huge family. — Debi Gliori

In grades 1 through 4 these books introduce the child to U.S. society - to family life, community activities, ordinary economic transactions, and some history. None of the books covering grades 1 through 4 contain one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life. — Paul Vitz

It took Lucy forty hours to die and we hardly left her side ... We spent those last hours kissing her frequently and telling her how deeply we loved her. Then I began to read Leah's children's books out loud to her. She had lived a storyless childhood, so I read in the last day of her life the books she had missed. I told her about Winnie the Pooh and Yertle the Turtle, took her Where the Wild Things Are, introduced her to Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland. Each of us took turns reading to her out of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and, at the very last, Leah insisted that I tell all the Great Dog Chippie stories I had told her during our year of exile from the family in Rome. — Pat Conroy

Parents often ask - how do I get my child interested in books and reading?

One tried and true way that my late husband and I used was paying them to read. For each book that my sons read, we paid them $1. They soon developed a love for reading and forgot all about the money. Amazing but true! — Soraya Diase Coffelt

Of all the gifts you can get, friends and family are the best! — Jan Britland

But it's also a human tendency - and a pronounced tendency in America - to become enamored of our tools and lose sight of their place. Think about a couple of the basic functions of any community: educating children and policing the streets. Today we spend huge effort and millions of dollars to bring more technology into the classroom, when the great majority of students in the great majority of circumstances can learn almost all of what they need to know with a supportive family, a pencil, some paper, good books, and a great teacher. The schools that produced Shakespeare and Jefferson and Darwin had some writing materials, some printed books - and that was it. — Eric Greitens

What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time. — Rachel Cusk

I'm a children's book writer, and my wife is a musician. We've raised a family on income from songs, performances and books. — Peter Lerangis

On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy's "Family Happiness", having marked several passages that moved him:
"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others ...
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?" ... — Jon Krakauer

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books. — Rita Dove

Hannah Rose Brown was not quite 13 years old when she discovered her family was cursed. THE PUZZLE RING — Kate Forsyth

I came from a family of incredible storytellers, but I didn't start writing children's books until I was 41 years old. — Patricia Polacco

I couldn't comprehend why she still hadn't stopped him because it's clearly every mother's responsibility to protect her children. After all, that's the trust that bonds a mother and her child together, forever — Veronika Gasparyan

I was astonished at how wonderful these books were; and even though I was occasionally discomforted when someone, having asked me what book I had in my pocket, looked aghast when I pulled out a copy of Heidi or Finn Family Moomintroll, I soon realized that my then-present condition of "second childhood" was not one of senility and depression but of renewal and awakening. — Jonathan Cott

Reading to younger children has come to be more or less an accepted thing, but reading to older children or to a family group is done less today with all the other attractions taking the time. Reading to a group provides a unity, a cohesion, that is wonderful. It is common bond of interest. It brings up plenty of things for family talk and discussion. A child who has been read to shows results in his speech and wider experience with languages. And definitely, if the reading is of good books, it is the beginning of good taste in literature. — Phyllis R. Fenner

My aim was to create armaments to protect the borders of my motherland. It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov became very well-known in the world; that it was used in many troubled places. I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the designers. Man is born to protect his family, his children, his wife. But I want you to know that apart from armaments, I have written three books in which I try to educate our youth to show respect for their families, for old people, for history. — Mikhail Kalashnikov

My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a book. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more or less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that nine-teenth century parents were suitable for children, and gothic ghost stories that were surely not; I read accounts of arduous travel through treacherous lands undertaken by spinsters in crinolines, and I read handbooks on decorum and etiquette intended for young ladies of good family; I read books with pictures and books without; books in English, books in French, books in languages I didn't understand where I could make up stories in my head on the basis of a handful of guessed-at words. Books. Books. And books. — Diane Setterfield

I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, murderous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep, through which they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the more foully. — Octave Mirbeau

There are 500 reasons I write for children ... Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics ... They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff ... They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

The worst part of it has been, I think, the adverse effect on family life. It kills off family conversation. And it's harder to get your children to read books. I became a confirmed reader when I was growing up in Glendale. I've loved reading all my life. Now I've got this daughter, Aissa, a very bright young lady
but it is a hard job to get her to read. Television's just too easy. — John Wayne

And yet the irony was that she soon placed herself in the margins voluntarily, giving up work for family, because she imagined that when she eventually arrived at her deathbed, she would feel more regret about unborn children than unwritten books. — Matt Haig

Charlotte!" said Glenda, one Thursday afternoon while she was washing dishes. "You didn't scrape out your leftover cereal this morning. It's disgusting. Come and scrape it out now."
"I can't," called Charlotte from the computer in the next room. "I'm too busy blowing things up. If I don't blow up ten things in the next five seconds, I'll die! — Jennifer Lott

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses - 120 war-horses - musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. "The whole of society," concludes the Japanese study, "was laid waste to its very foundations."2698 Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. "Such a weapon," he told the American psychiatrist, "has the power to make everything into nothing. — Richard Rhodes

Daring to make a difference in today's youth-one page at a time — William Sawyers

I have thought you could not give everything to your books and also to your children, so for a long time, I thought if I had a child or a family, I'd think, 'How would I support them?' because basically I would stop writing. — Sonya Hartnett

He [David Foster Wallace] compares raising children to raising books, you should take pride in the work you do inside a family and not from how they make out in the world. "It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you," is what he says. — David Lipsky

She never wanted an extravagant life-- only one filled with simple joys like children, family, friendship, good books, funny jokes, and a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream. — S.A. Huchton

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim's friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world. — William H Gass

Although my road to writing seems like it may have come easily, there were a few bumps in that road. I didn't get a lot of encouragement from friends, although my family were great supporters. I also had many ... what you would call "mind-boggling" moments, when I would doubt myself and what I was writing. It has been said that we, ourselves, are our own worst critics.
All the hard work had payed off though, and I created a children's book that I am proud of, and an unforgettable little girl that will touch the hearts of many."-Nina Jean Slack — Nina Jean Slack

If books were food, I'd weigh thirty thousand pounds. I devour the things. I'm addicted to reading, and when I'm in the middle of a great book, I'm tempted to tell my kids to eat dog food for dinner. Before you call the Department of Family and Children's Services, I said tempted. I've never actually done that. — Sandi Hutcheson