Quotes & Sayings About Girl Child

What if they make me stay? To keep me safe?""I wouldn't, if I were them."
"What do you mean?""Any minute now ... "Two seconds later, the sound of an alarm filled my ears.
"What did you do?" I said over the noise as he backed up toward the bathroom door.
"The girl who gave you the note?"
"Yes ... "
"I caught her staring at my lighter."
I blinked. "You gave a child, in a psych ward, a lighter. — Michelle Hodkin

She'd say the girl needed warmth and affection and someone to look after her, but Jack had to wonder if that didn't have more to do with a woman's own desires than the needs of a child. — Eowyn Ivey

Nicole's door opened, and she stomped down the hall. "I have something to say," she said, giving him the Slitty Eyes of Death. "You're totally unfair, and if I run away, you shouldn't be surprised." "Don't make me put a computer chip in your ear," Liam answered. "It's not funny! I hate you." "Well, I love you, even if you did ruin my life by turning into a teenager," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Did you study for your test?" "Yes." "Good." He looked at his daughter - so much like Emma, way too pretty. Why weren't there convent schools anymore? Or chastity belts? "Want some supper? I saved your plate." She rolled her eyes with all the melodrama a teenager could muster. "Fine. I may as well become a fat pig since I can't ever go on a date." "That's my girl," he said and, grinning, got up to heat up her dinner. — Kristan Higgins

Ghosts are not what I remember of my childhood; but somehow they
infuse memories of myself as a child, the little girl in a storybook, with
ghosts hovering around her. — Yolanda A. Reid

I was very shy as a girl. Absurdly shy, even. Maybe because I was an only child. And I think that's why I'm so happy to have two kids now. — Monica Bellucci

I grew up as an only child. I think it might just be that my dad really didn't care that I was a girl. "You're gonna do certain things 'cause I want you to, and that's the way it is." — Mitchell Baker

I felt like I needed to comfort both the little girl inside me and my mother, assuring them that neither of them could have prevented the rape. I didn't want my mother to blame herself and I didn't want to blame the little girl inside of me for not speaking up at the age of six. — Erin Merryn

I was not an attractive child. When I didn't use my Girl Scouts uniform as a uniform, I used it as a tent. — Joan Rivers

But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place in the world.
Instead I had Hell. — John Marsden

I was a boy in the ads I did as a child. My sister was the girl, and I was the boy. I had short hair and I was in overalls and I was giving flowers to my sister Daisy, who fit their model of what a girl was supposed to look like. — Rose McGowan

Each girl is special-one of a kind-a child of God, and each must be taught to live his commandments in order to inherit his eternal blessings. — Martha H. Tingey

My face grew hot. "We were discussing the investigation," I told him quickly. "He was here a quarter of an hour at the most."
Father smiled at me sadly. "My dear girl, if you din't know what mischief can be gotten up to in a quarter of an hour you are no child of mine. — Deanna Raybourn

I think the time that I knew that I was capable of all the things that I disliked the most in other people was, oddly enough, one of the most joyful moments: when our first child was born. And I just felt this love for this beautiful little girl who was so fragile and so vulnerable. Some point around that week, I started to understand why wars were fought. I started to understand why people were capable of cruelty in order to protect themselves and their own. And I was very humbled to realise that. — Michka Assayas

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

The Talmud, the compilation of discussions of Jewish Law which I have quoted earlier in this book, gives examples of bad prayers, improper prayers, which one should not utter. If a woman is pregnant, neither she nor her husband should pray, "May God grant that this child be a boy" (nor, for that matter, may they pray that it be a girl). The sex of the child is determined at conception, and God cannot be invoked to change it. Again, if a man sees a fire engine racing toward his neighborhood, he should not pray, "Please God, don't let the fire be in my house." Not only is it mean-spirited to pray that someone else's house burn instead of yours, but it is futile. A certain house is already on fire; the most sincere or articulate of prayers will not affect the question of which house it is. — Harold S. Kushner

When the angel spoke, God awoke in the heart of this girl of Nazareth and moved within her like a giant. He stirred and opened His eyes and her soul and saw that in containing Him she contained the world besides. The Annunciation was not so much a vision as an earthquake in which God moved the universe and unsettled the spheres, and the beginning and end of all things came before her in her deepest heart. And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm she slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence. And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence." -Thomas Merton — Thomas Merton

If Pete's (Sampras) child is a girl, my son will like her; if he's a boy, my son will defeat him. — Andre Agassi

How could Lincoln reply to such comments, without offending abolitionists or frightening slave-owning Unionists from the Upper South? Placating words were likewise out of the question. A plea from Virginia suggesting Lincoln need do no more than assure Southerners they had the right to bring their property into all American territories reminded the dubious president-elect of an apt story. It concerned a little girl who begged her mother to let her play outside. The mother repeatedly said no, the child persisted, and the mother finally lost patience and gave her a whipping, "upon which," Lincoln chortled, "the girl exclaimed: 'Now, Ma. I can certainly run out. — Harold Holzer

My child has changed things for me. Lately, I really wish there were greater roles for women. I think I see it in a different way now. I look at my little girl and I don't want her to think that all she has to be is pretty and quiet. — Brooke Smith

A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate; sodomising the child is OK. If the man penetrates and damages the child then he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl, however, does not count as one of his four permanent wives. The man will not be eligible to marry the girl's sister. — Ruhollah Khomeini

The Father protects his children, the septons taught, but Davos had led his boys into the fire. Dale would never give his wife the child they had prayed for, and Allard, with his girl in Oldtown and his girl in Kings Landing, and his girl in Braavos, they would all be weeping soon. Matthos would never captain his own ship, as he dreamed. Maric would never have his knighthood.
'How can I live when they are dead? So many brave knights and mighty lords have died, better men than me, and highborn. Crawl inside your cave, Davos. Crawl inside and shrink up small and the ship will go away, and no one will trouble you ever again. Sleep on your stone pillow and let the gulls peck out your eyes while the crabs feast on your flesh. You've feasted on enough of them, you owe them. Hide, smuggler. Hide, and be quiet, and die. — George R R Martin

The first time I got pregnant, I was a young girl - I was 17 years old. Although I knew right away that I wanted to keep my child, being a pregnant teen was an extremely scary experience for me. Luckily, my family and friends were very supportive and were there for me every step of the way. — Paula Garces

We must work tirelessly to make sure that every boy and girl in America who is up for adoption has a family waiting to reach him or her ... This is a season of miracles, and perhaps there is no greater miracle than finding a loving home for a child who needs one. — William J. Clinton

You come to this place, mid-life. You don't know how you got here, but suddenly you're staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn't. When the midwife says, 'It's a boy,' where does the girl go? When you think you're pregnant, and you're not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines. — Hilary Mantel

Let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God, that had invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent young man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences. — Francis S. Collins

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.-Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

The reason why Jane's spirit was not broken was that she had a secret. It was her own special secret and she had told no one else except Peggy. She locked it in her heart and hugged it to herself. It was this glorious secret that filled her with such irrepressible joy and exhilaration. But it was also to be the cause of her greatest disaster, and her life-long grief.
The rumour that her father was a high-born gentleman in Parliament must have reached Jane's ears when she was a little girl. Perhaps she had heard the officers talking about it, or perhaps another child had heard the adults talking and told her. Perhaps Jane's mother had told another workhouse inmate, who had passed it on. One can never tell how rumours start.
To Jane, it was not a rumour. It was an absolute fact. Her daddy was a high-born gentleman, who one day would come and take her away. She fantasised endlessly about her daddy. She talked to him, and he talked to her. — Jennifer Worth

I'd like to sit there, I said softly to the girl sitting in front of the other mirror. She scampered.
I took over her abandoned make-up and painted my face. Red cheeks, to attract hungry vampyre glances. Black liquid eyeliner and mascara, to draw attention away from my bitter eyes. My silky-thin, raven hair, undone in waves over my bare shoulders. The magenta shade of apple gloss on my lips, to make them plump and inviting. Finally, a strapless golden dress that hugged my hips and not much lower. I stood up, feeling the cold air slide down the bare skin of my back like fingers, and panicked. I couldn't wear something like this! Not without a cardigan! A light dress jacket, at least!
I took a gulp of Amrit's wine and detached myself from the fretting child in my head. Then I strode from the sleeping chambers. — Heather Heffner

WAR CHILD is the true story of Magdalena (Leni) Janic whose name appears on The Welcome Wall at Sydney's Darling Harbour. The story spans 100 years starting in pre WWII Nazi Germany and ends in the suburbs of Adelaide. It's a window into what life was like for a young illegitimate German girl growing up in poverty, coping with ostracism, bullying, abuse and dispossession as society was falling down around her and she becomes a refugee. But it's also a story of a woman's unconditional love for her family, the sacrifices she made and secrets she kept to protect them. Her ultimate secret was only revealed in a bizarre twist after her death and much to her daughter's (and author) surprise involved her. A memorable tear-jerker! A sad cruel story told with so much love. — Annette Janic

Why are women so fearful? The answer to that question lies at the root of The Cinderella Complex. (...) Many women achieve a certain amount of success in their careers and professions and still remain inwardly insecure. In fact (...), it's remarkable how many women these days retain a hidden core of self doubt while performing on the outside as if they were towers of confidence. (...)
Lack of confidence seems to follow us from childhood (...) No matter how fiercely we try to live like adults - flexible, powerful and free - that girl-child hangs on (...). The effects of such insecurity are widespread, and they result in a disturbing social phenomenon: women in general tend to function well below the level of their native abilities. For reasons that are both cultural and psychological - a system that doesn't really expect a great deal from us, in combination with our own personal fears of standing up and facing the world - women are keeping themselves down. — Colette Dowling

She say, All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy, I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain't safe in a family of men. But I never thought I'd have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me. Now if you want a dead son-in-law you just keep on advising him like you doing. She put her hand on her hip. I used to hunt game with a bow and arrow, she say. — Alice Walker

From all we have said about plotting in general it should be evident that even in those modern plots in which events happen by laws not immediately visible, as when, for instance, the tattooed man in the circus reveals in the course of a whimsical conversation that he has on his chest a tattoo of the little girl now looking at him, a child he has never before seen, or as when, in Isak Dinesen, a decorous old nun turns abruptly into a monkey
there must be some rational or poetically persuasive basis. — John Gardner

Out of the new arrivals in our lives
the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child
we constantly make of ourselves our selves. — Nancy Mairs

Then the crying started. First one child, a little girl called Jen from across the street, then another, then another, until the June afternoon sounded like a vacation in hell. — Kyle M. Scott

I had wanted to live forever as a gypsy girl; I had wanted to live forever as a child, tumbling down a rabbit hole. I had been granted both wishes, only to find immortality was not what it had promised to be; instead of a passport to the future, it was a yoke that bound me to the past. — Melanie Benjamin

A girl child who is even a little bit educated is more conscious of family planning, health care and, in turn, her children's own education. — Azim Premji

God is a God of galaxies, of storms, of roaring seas and boiling thunder, but He is also the God of bread baking, of a child's smile, of dust motes in the sun. He is who He is, and always shall be. Look around you now. He is speaking always and everywhere. His personality can be seen and known and leaned upon. The sun is belching flares while mountains scrape our sky while ants are milking aphids on their colonial leaves and dolphins are laughing in the surf and wheat is rippling and wind is whipping and a boy is looking into the eyes of a girl and mortals are dying. — N.D. Wilson

I do urge you to welcome children. Even one child will make a difference in your life that you cannot fathom. I promise you, my girl. — Maryanne O'Hara

Looking at these people now from behind the counter, made her feel like that little girl again, the deprived child that used to press her nose on the glass, peering at things she could never have. — Effrosyni Moschoudi

Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power - local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic - on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn't make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they'd placed the monument. I gave up and went in search of Lamin. — Zadie Smith

No, no, don't touch your mother just before the baby is born. Now it will be a girl child, because you are one. Run along now. Take your evil eye with you."

"Ghias, we must be careful not to teach the girls too much. How will they ever find husbands if they are too learned? The less they know, the less they will want of the outside world. — Indu Sundaresan

Whatcha doin', Freak Girl?"
"What does it look like, brainiac?" I shot back, even surprising myself with the force of my jab. "I'll give you three guesses. No, wait. Don't strain yourself. Wouldn't want to hurt your head." I waved a flyer in his face, channeling my inner mean girl. "See these? I'm hanging them ... on a ... wall!" I spoke the last part slowly, as if addressing a dim-witted child. Which wasn't far off the mark, now that I thought about it. "With tape," I added, waving at the dispenser. "You know-sticky, sticky! — Mari Mancusi

I was greeted by the Ulmers' eleven-year-old daughter, a girl of remarkable poise. Mrs. Ulmer was busily typing a manuscript that needed to make the evening mail and after welcoming me, in a very friendly manner, she returned to work. There were two other children and Mr. Ulmer, who was writing the manuscript just as his wife was typing it. The youngest child, who could have been no more than five or six, had the task of relaying the handwritten pages from his father to his eldest sister, who would quickly scan them for errors, and from her to his mother. The middle child, a little girl of seven or eight, lay on the floor with a large dictionary and would look up words when called upon by her parents or sister. — Robert Bruce Stewart

I'm not a girl that will lay in diamonds but I will run through the flowers of the seeds we plant together. — Nikki Rowe

So Captain Jack's come a-courtin'." Her hands stilled on the basket. "Who?" "The tall Shawnee who come by your cabin." The tall one. Lael felt a small surge of triumph at learning his name. Captain Jack. Oddly, she felt no embarrassment. Lifting her shoulders in a slight shrug, she continued pulling the vines into a tight circle. "He come by, but I don't know why." "Best take a long look in the mirror, then." Lael's eyes roamed the dark walls. Ma Horn didn't own one. "Beads and a blanket, was it?" She nodded and looked back down. "I still can't figure out why some Shawnee would pay any mind to a white girl like me." Ma Horn chuckled, her face alight in the dimness. "Why, Captain Jack's as white as you are." "What?" she blurted, eyes wide as a child's. Ma Horn's smile turned sober. "He's no Indian, Shawnee or otherwise, so your pa says. He was took as a child from some-wheres in North Carolina. All he can remember of his past life is his white name - Jack. — Laura Frantz

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead

I'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play

- The Girl Child — Nazim Hikmet

I've never thought much about whether I was happy or if I had fun as a child. I was a so-so girl who lived with a so-so family in a so-so village. I didn't know that there might be another way to live, and I didn't worry about it either. — Lisa See

I don't want to be stinky poo-poo girl, I want to be happy flower child. — Drew Barrymore

I am equivalent of what in the Harry Potter world is called a sqib. A damp Squib. As the seventh child, all had expected me to come loaded with the whole box of fireworlks. Instead they got a girl who could tell you where you left your keys. Yes, that's right. I'm equivalent of a whistling key fob. — Joss Stirling

For she was the only girl they loved, as she is the queenly pearl you prize, because of the way the night that first we met she is bound to be, methinks, and not in vain, the darling of my heart, sleeping in her april cot, within her singachamer, with her greengageflavoured candywhistle duetted to the crazyquilt, Isobel, she is so pretty, truth to tell, wildwood's eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves of moss and daphnedews, how all so still she lay, neath of the whitethorn, child of tree, like some losthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled, as fain would she anon, for soon again 'twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me! — James Joyce

In England, I was quite struck to see how forward the girls are made
a child of 10 years old, will chat and keep you company, while her parents are busy or out etc.
with the ease of a woman of 26. But then, how does this education go on?
Not at all: it absolutely stops short. — Fanny Burney

She could hardly tell him it was because the child had been born a girl, destined from birth to be bound and gagged, to never be free. And she seemed to have sensed it far sooner than most. Sadly, the poor fool seemed to believe that she could actually do something about it. — Sonali Dev

A prison chaplain in the West of England confessed he had given up one prisoner as hopeless, so stubborn was he against any approach by him, and known throughout the jail as the most truculent and obstinate troublemaker.
But one day the governor was told of a visitor who insisted on seeing him. To his surprise, it was a little girl. "He's my daddy," she explained, "It's his birthday." The governor allowed the prisoner to be sent for.
"Daddy," said the child as he was brought in, "this was your birthday, so I wanted to come and see you." Then taking a lock of hair out of her pocket, she offered it to him. "I had no money to buy a present for you. But I brought this, a lock of my own hair."
The prisoner broke down and clasped her in his arms, sobbing. He became a changed man after that and guarded, as his most precious possession, the lock of hair that reminded him that somebody still loved him. — Francis Gay

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil. — Ralph Fiennes

My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.' — Lupita Nyong'o

There have been reports of many child marriages taking place in the Malabar region in Kerala, especially among the Muslim community. However, under Muslim Personal Law, a girl can be married once she attains puberty, and hence we cannot say that such marriages are not valid. — Girija Vyas

While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or a small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body... then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs... a small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting - a doll with chalky swollen limbs, its eyes wide and blank, like blue ponds, and its mouth open, showing a swollen little tongue. A lanky boy was skewed, one half of his body sliding from the other. A child seemed at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to scream at her. — Doris Lessing

A friend of mine once saw Mandela in a South African airport and told me this story. The president had noticed a lady who was walking by with her daughter, a beautiful five- or six-year-old girl, with blond hair and blue eyes. Mandela walked up to this little girl and leaned down and shook her hand, and he said, "Do you know who I am?" And the child smiled and said, "Yes, you are President Mandela." Mandela said, "Yes, I am your president. And if you work very hard in school and you learn a lot and you are nice to everybody, you too could grow up to be President of South Africa." Just — Nelson Mandela

I am sorry for you. And I am sorry for me. When you are sent back to me, perhaps a month from now, perhaps a year, I will try to remember this day, and you looking like a child, a little lost among all these clothes. I will try to remember that you were innocent of any plotting; that today at least, you were more a girl than a Boleyn. — Philippa Gregory

The girl had taken a few restless turns to and fro - closely watched meanwhile by her hidden observer - when the heavy bell of St. Paul's tolled for the death of another day. Midnight had come upon the crowded city. The palace, the night-cellar,* the jail, the madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all. — Charles Dickens

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, a thoroughly dedicated rocket town. The father of everyone I knew - mine included - was some sort of engineer working to build the Apollo rockets to send men to the moon. For a while as a child, I thought that when you grew up you became a rocket engineer if you were a boy and you married a rocket engineer if you were a girl; few other options in the world appeared to exist. — Mike Brown

Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. "I never knew a girl to have such gumption," she'd say. "But I'm not too sure it's a good thing. — Jeannette Walls

Chinasa continued to imagine the girl, a small, veil-wearing child with fear written all over her face, running for dear life. Soon she could see herself as the girl, running and running like the girl. But there was only so far her imagination could take her: She herself had never been a runner. And anyway, how fast did one have to run to outrun a bomb? — Chinelo Okparanta

He keeps his arms away from me, but eventually, holding him, I feel him tuck his chin over my head. Then he whispers, "You're the sweetest girl, the best girl, I ever kissed, Carrie West," and rubs his face into my hair like a child, breathing deep. — Mary Ann Rivers

My favorite part on 'Energy Fields,' at the end of the track is a little girl laughing, and to me, it's a child watching the world, her friends, and so-called grownup people, and the way they try to understand the world. — Dave Davies

And I'm left with this girl, this Siren of Mixed Signals, this Norah. She's a fuck-good kisser, but clearly has some massive consistency issues. I ask her how the fuck she knows Tris, because that is leaving me completely confused, and at first she's looking at me like I'm this guy she didn't just start kissing out of nowhere, but then she's got her hand on my arm in a way that makes me really notice I have an arm, and then she's making to run away, and at the same time looking at me like I'm some cancer child. Then I take hold of her arm and she resists without really resisting. Finally she pulls away, only to touch my face in this way that reminds me exactly of her kiss.Then she calls me you poor schmuck. — David Levithan

There is no looking-glass here and I don't know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us - hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I? — Jean Rhys

Her love is rare but she'll keep you wild. — Nikki Rowe

The reaction of the people below to this fantastic sight and sound was one of wild excitement. Details could be seen vividly from aloft. An elderly man and woman fell to their knees and prayed. People in the villages stood still and gaped upward. Most of them still had their Sunday finery on. "You could see people going to church...man, wife, and child walking along the country roads." Bombardier Herbert Light, through his binoculars, saw an open-air festival in progress, with the women dressed in colorful skirts and blouses. One of them threw her apron over her head in panic.
As they roared over the wheat fields, the first unfriendly acts occurred: farmers threw stones and pitchforks at them. One farmer leading two horses was startled by the advancing planes and leaped into a nearby stream. A girl swimming in another river was reported by ten separate crews. — Leon Wolff

If you are concerned for the future of our civilization, there is no more cheering sight than a boy or girl who is lost in a book. It's an image I cling to, in moments of depression: the absorbed child, reading. — Susan Cooper

Girls are pearls, ladies are rubies, mothers are moulders, and women are wonderful. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Something about family and trying to relate it to the movie with, 'Oh, if I was to have a child how many kids do I want?' And 'do I want a boy or a girl?' I didn't realize you could place orders, I honestly didn't realize it was like a drive-through, that you could talk to a little electronic voice. — Jennifer Aniston

Audrey didn't understand Piper's obsession with Erik. Yes, he was insanely gorgeous, with dark hair and dark sexy eyes, but he gave off a dick vibe. Piper was such a sweet and funny girl, and Audrey really didn't think they would be good together. But apparently Erik Titov did it for Piper, and who was she to question it? She herself was in love with an ass-hat and lusting over a child. She was in no place to judge anyone on their lusty needs. — Toni Aleo

A doll is among the most pressing needs as well as the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for it, adorn it, dress and undress it, give it lessons, scold it a little, put it to bed and sing it to sleep, pretend that the object is a living person - all the future of the woman resides in this. Dreaming and murmuring, tending, cossetting, sewing small garments, the child grows into girlhood, from girlhood into womanhood, from womanhood into wifehood, and the first baby is the successor of the last doll. A little girl without a doll is nearly as deprived and quite as unnatural as a woman without a child. — Victor Hugo

Mhysa!" a brown-skinned man shouted out at her. He had a child on his shoulder, a little girl, and she screamed the same word in her thin voice. "Mhysa! Mhysa!"

Dany looked at Missandei. "What are they shouting?"

"It is Ghiscari, the old pure tongue. It means 'Mother.'"

Dany felt a lightness in her chest. I will never bear a living child, she remembered. Her hand trembled as she raised it. Perhaps she smiled. She must have, because the man grinned and shouted again, and others took up the cry. "Mhysa!" they called. "Mhysa! MHYSA!" They were all smiling at her, reaching for her, kneeling before her. "Maela," some called her, while others cried "Aelalla" or "Qathei" or "Tato," but whatever the tongue it all meant the same thing. Mother. They are calling me Mother. — George R R Martin

When the strong healthy boy, howling at the indignity of the birth process, was put to her breast, she felt a wild tenderness for him, The other baby, Francis, in the crib next her bed, began to whimper. Katie had a flash of contempt for the weak child she had borne a year ago, when she compared her to this new handsome son. She was quickly ashamed of hr contempt. She knew it wasn't the little girl's fault. "I must watch myself carefully," she thought. "I am going to love this boy more than the girl but I mustn't ever let her know. It is wrong to love one child more than the other but this is something that I cannot help. — Betty Smith

Yvette had never talked about her marriage - she was a smart girl, and she knew you had no right to complain about someone you got all the way to the altar with. You made that choice, even if you were a child when you did it, and the marriage vow was sacred. — Maile Meloy

I recognized Tiger Lily instantly; I had seen her before. She stood out like a combination of a roving panther and a girl. She stalked instead of walked. Her body still held the invincibility of a child, when at her age it should have been giving way to fragile, flexible curves. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

I went over to see Marina two or three or four times a week. I knew as long as I could see the girl I would be all right ... . Soon after, I got a letter from Fay. She and the child were living in a hippie commune in New Mexico. It was a nice place, she said. Marina would be able to breathe there. She enclosed a little drawing the girl had made for me. — Charles Bukowski

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs - all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. "Here," they said, "this is beautiful, and if you are on this day 'worthy' you may have it. — Toni Morrison

Soon after the doctor, Dolly had arrived. She knew that there was to be a consultation that day, and though she was only just up after her confinement (she had another baby, a little girl, born at the end of the winter), though she had trouble and anxiety enough of her own, she had left her tiny baby and a sick child, to come and hear Kitty's fate, which was to be decided that day. — Leo Tolstoy

When a couple has a strong preference for a baby boy or girl, who is injured by allowing them to choose? Certainly not the child. — Gregory Stock

The situation of women living in Islam-stricken
societies and under Islamic laws is the outrage
of the 21st century. Burqa-clad and veiled women
and girls, beheadings, stoning to death,
floggings, child sexual abuse in the name of
marriage and sexual apartheid are only the most
brutal and visible aspects of women's
rightlessness and third class citizen status in the Middle East — Maryam Namazie

Increasingly, the girl child is becoming an endangered specie as
pedophiles' continue to roam free in our societies terrorizing
the lives of our children and stripping them of all the joy and
excitement that comes with childhood. — Oche Otorkpa

Granny sat down on the step and stared off into the trees. That girl right there, she was my only child. I have lost two husbands, one by death, the other by divorce, and I have lost my parents and my brothers and sisters. But nothing ever pierced me to the core like that little girl's dying. I know it wasn't your daddy's fault. I know I messed up by filling a report to Social Services. Is that what you want to here? Is that what it takes for you not to be mad at me? — Frances O'Roark Dowell

I grew up watching 'Superman.' As a child, when I first learned to dive into a swimming pool, I wasn't diving, I was flying, like Superman. I used to dream of rescuing a girl I had a crush on from a playground bully. — Tom Hiddleston

Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything 'sad'. — Joan Didion

The child cannot too early learn to be a good citizen? I think this is questionable: citizenship is an adult affair. Let school and home teach the child to respect the laws and institutions of his country. For the time being that should suffice. To use the juvenile novel or biography to turn the child into an internationalist or an advocate of racial tolerance may be high-minded, but I would suggest that the child first be allowed to turn into a boy or girl. Pious Little Rollo is dead; the Good Little Citizen is replacing him. The moralistic literature of the last century tried to produce small paragons of virtue. How about our urge to manufacture small paragons of social consciousness? — Clifton Fadiman

This habit starts awfully early. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, who has been studying the nature of stereotypes for many years, once reported that her daughter returned from kindergarten complaining that "boys are crybabies."25 The child's evidence was that she had seen two boys crying on their first day away from home. Brewer, ever the scientist, asked whether there hadn't also been little girls who cried. "Oh yes," said her daughter. "But only some girls cry. I didn't cry." Brewer's little girl was already dividing the world, as everyone does, into us and them. Us is the most fundamental social category in the brain's organizing system, and it's hardwired. — Carol Tavris

Selfishly, perhaps, Catti-brie had determined that the assassin was her own business. He had unnerved her, had stripped away years of training and discipline and reduced her to the quivering semblance of a frightened child. But she was a young woman now, no more a girl. She had to personally respond to that emotional humiliation, or the scars from it would haunt her to her grave, forever paralyzing her along her path to discover her true potential in life. — R.A. Salvatore

In 2012, a five-year-old girl in Shandong province described to me how ten officials had chased her six-months-pregnant mother through the fields to prevent the birth of the family's second child, a boy. She died during the procedure. — Barbara Demick

I have been wrongly accused; and you, ma'am, and everybody else, will now think me wicked."
"We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child. Continue to act as a good girl, and you will satisfy us. — Charlotte Bronte

Slavish obedience to the clerics, who know how to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of religion, is killing our girls. We must speak-blaspheme, if necessary; be accused of being apostates, if that is what is required. Muslims are taught that Islam put an end to the Arabian practice of burying alive newborn baby girls because they were considered worthless and a burden, but as long as we stay quiet in the face of the abomination of child marriage, we are effectively burying our girls alive today. — Mona Eltahawy

The earth had two children
A son named Adam
and a daughter — Karan Patade

When I was a child I liked watching shows about bounty hunters and Canadian Mounties. I liked the 'Lone Ranger,' I liked shows where the guy saved the girl from the villain. I just liked those kinds of things and I wanted to be a guy like that, you know, that would save the damsel in distress. — Duane Chapman

I acknowledged Gabe and his attempts at flight the way a legless child might view a hopeful but misguided parent buying a house full of stairs. After a while, when Gabe offered me a morning greeting, it didn't feel like he was greeting me but rather a giant pair of wings; no girl, just feathers. — Leslye Walton

Jutta whispers, A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn't let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren't we half-breeds too? Aren't we half our mother, half our father? — Anthony Doerr