Missing Children Quotes & Sayings

Every dollar spent to punish a drug user or seller is a dollar that cannot be spent collecting restitution from a robber. Every hour spent investigating a drug user or seller is an hour that could have been used to find a missing child. Every trial held to prosecute a drug user or seller is court time that could be used to prosecute a rapist in a case that might otherwise have been plea bargained. — Randy Barnett

He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had, the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes — Hermann Hesse

The things that people were the most grateful for were the ordinary things in life. The sound of your spouse's laugh, the smell of morning coffee, the echo of children playing in the yard. The little things. In waiting for the big moments - the vacations, the retirements, the birthdays - we risk missing the experiences of life most worthy of celebrating. — John O'Leary

We want the world to focus on children whose lives have been devastated by AIDS. The millions of children who are missing their parents; their childhood, their future but most importantly, they are missing YOU. Everyone can make a real difference. Your voice is needed in a global movement that can change their world. — Pierce Brosnan

What is missing from today's dialogue is the effect autism is having on families, our society and what the unknown factors are. The 300lb. gorilla in the room is that our children with autism today will soon become adults with autism. — Jenny McCarthy

I also know that I won't go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don't think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason - for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons- sometimes out of pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish. — Elizabeth Gilbert

And while we destroy / Our children will grow / Not missing the things they'll never know / A crime against them / Against you and me / A crime against all humanity — Kim Wilde

If women's choices - such as taking time off to rear children - make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys' behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years? — Sendhil Mullainathan

Children are my pet cause. I have a foster child in El Salvador, and whenever I'm home, I work for the Adam Walsh Foundation, which finds missing children. I also do some hospital visits and other things for the Make-a-Wish Foundation. — Jane Badler

Every nation on Earth was attacked. Earth's casualties were 461 killed, 223 wounded, none captured, and 216 missing. Mars' casualties were 149,315 killed, 446 wounded, 11 captured, and 46,634 missing. At the end of the war, every Martian had been killed, wounded, captured, or been found missing. Not a soul was left on Mars. Not a building was left standing on Mars. The last waves of Martians to attack Earth were,-to the horror of the Earthlings who pot-shotted them, old men, women, and a few little children. The — Kurt Vonnegut

I've watched congregations devote years and years to heated arguments about whether a female missionary should be allowed to share about her ministry on a Sunday morning, whether students older than ten should have female Sunday school teachers, whether girls should be encouraged to attend seminary, whether women should be permitted to collect the offering or write the church newsletter or make an announcement ... all while thirty thousand children die every day from preventable disease. If that's not an adventure in missing the point, I don't know what is. — Rachel Held Evans

the largest "negative eugenics" project in human history was not the systemic extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany or Austria in the 1930s. That ghastly distinction falls on India and China, where more than 10 million female children are missing from adulthood because of infanticide, abortion, and neglect of female children. Depraved — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I do know I want to have children. That's the only thing missing in my life. I certainly thought I'd have some by now. — John Stamos

If you read 'Lord of the Rings' and dismiss it as a lie because it has orcs and elves, you're missing the whole point of the story. If children don't have to be concerned about strangers because there's no such thing as a Big Bad Wolf dressed like Granny, you're missing the point. — Doug TenNapel

If love was compass enough, said Armand quietly, there would be no missing children. — Louise Penny

Kids? It's like living with homeless people. They're cute but they just chase you around all day long going, 'Can I have a dollar? I'm missing a shoe! I need a ride! — Kathleen Madigan

Missing a nose. With these children Santa has to be careful not to ask, And what would you like for Christmas? — David Sedaris

When texting begins to take the place of substantive in-person conversations for any of us, we are training the language and speech centers of our brain for a new, unnatural, and superficial model of connection. When that training starts early, as it does now for young texters, they get so used to it at such a young age that, unlike the newborn baby who innately knows something is missing and complains about it, our older tech-trained children don't even know what they have lost. — Catherine Steiner-Adair

To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don't have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder. I wanted Margaret to go to college, but when she actually went away it broke my heart. Maybe if you had enough children you could get used to those departures, but, having only three, I never did. I felt them like amputations. Something I needed was missing. Sometimes, even now, when I come into this house and it sounds empty, before I think I will wonder, Where are they? — Wendell Berry

Birds are and always have been reincarnated old men with Tourette's syndrome having somehow managed to dupe the reproductive saga. They fuck each other and tend to their home repairs and children while never missing their true mission. To scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth. They know the truth. Screaming bloody murder all over the world in our ears, but sadly we don't speak bird. — Kurt Cobain

Taste is developed by the diversity of the products one can sample. I think our children today may be missing an education about food. We must teach them to know their cuisine and to know the equilibrium of nourishment. That is very important for health. — Joel Robuchon

It was-this always seems to shock people all over again- a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words at the neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand vivid things around me, Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost. — Tana French

No death, no suffering. No funeral homes, abortion clinics, or psychiatric wards. No rape, missing children, or drug rehabilitation centers. No bigotry, no muggings or killings. No worry or depression or economic downturns. No wars, no unemployment. No anguish over failure and miscommunication. No con men. No locks. No death. No mourning. No pain. No boredom. No arthritis, no handicaps, no cancer, no taxes, no bills, no computer crashes, no weeds, no bombs, no drunkenness, no traffic jams and accidents, no septic-tank backups. No mental illness. No unwanted e-mails. Close friendships but no cliques, laughter but no put-downs. Intimacy, but no temptation to immorality. No hidden agendas, no backroom deals, no betrayals. Imagine mealtimes full of stories, laughter, and joy, without fear of insensitivity, inappropriate behavior, anger, gossip, lust, jealousy, hurt feelings, or anything that eclipses joy. That will be Heaven. — Randy Alcorn

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years - the years during which young men enter their criminal prime - the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime. — Steven D. Levitt

Her eyes popped open in time to see flames shoot up behind the first-floor windows of Angie's Books. Angie! Where was Angie? Where were her children? The bookstore owner lived in the apartment above her shop with sixteen-year-old Beth and twelve-year-old Bradley.
The Moosetookalook Fire Department was located right next door, housed in part of the town's redbrick municipal building. The overhead door had already been raised. As Liss watched, unable to move, unable to look away, the truck pulled out, maneuvering so that it could get closer to the burning building. — Kaitlyn Dunnett

Every time I see a child walking down the street I like to trip them. While they look for their missing teeth, I personally remind them that no matter how hard they try I will always be better than them. — Zach Braff

I want to feel myself part of things, of the great drift and swirl: not cut off, missing things, like being sent to bed early as a child, the blinds being drawn while the sun and cheerful voices came through the chink from the garden. — Marion Milner

Once upon a time a man whose ax was missing suspected his neighbor's son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief and spoke like a thief. But the man found his ax while digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor's son, the boy walked, looked and spoke like any other child. — Laozi

If I had to come up with a single metaphorical device to express what is missing in childhood now it would be something on the order of string: the tie that binds, the thread of connection, the weave of narrative, the web of life." NOAH'S CHILDREN — Sara Stein

Lost forever. I wanted to believe that those wrongs could be righted, and the only way to do that, was to write a story where those missing children could be found. That in some way, they could be brought home. Even if it was just a book. My main character, Rylee Adamson is a Tracker, the equivalent of a psychic bloodhound. She can find — Anonymous

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. — Herman Melville

In Freakonomics, we examined the causes of the rise and fall of violent crime in the United States. In 1960, crime began a sudden climb. By 1980, the homicide rate had doubled, reaching a historic peak. For several years crime stayed perilously high, but in the early 1990s it began to fall and kept falling. So what happened?
In Freakonomics, we identified one missing factor - the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s. The theory was jarring but simple. A rise in abortion meant that fewer unwanted children were being born, which meant fewer children growing up in the sort of difficult circumstances that increase the likelihood of criminality. — Steven D. Levitt

All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves 'hippies'. — Joan Didion

I still can't say whether I ever want children ... .I can only say how I feel now
grateful to be on my own. I also know that I won't go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don't think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence. For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend, we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful some not. Still we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only "I'm sorry for your loss." But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held? — Laura Bush

Is this what family is like: the feeling that everyone's connected, that with one piece missing, the whole thing's broken? — Trenton Lee Stewart

You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children's books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife's work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing. — Meg Wolitzer

I guess the reasons against having more children always seem uninspiring and superficial. What exactly am I missing out on? Money? A few more hours of sleep? A more peaceful meal? More hair? These are nothing compared to what I get from these five monsters who rule my life. I believe each of my five children has made me a better man. So I figure I only need another thirty-four kids to be a pretty decent guy. Each one of them has been a pump of light into my shriveled black heart. I would trade money, sleep, or hair for a smile from one of my children in a heartbeat. — Jim Gaffigan

Growing up, I didn't know about families who were missing a father, because there weren't any in our neighborhood. Today over a third of American children are born into single-parent homes. Is this all men's doing? — Timothy J. Russert

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing. — Flannery O'Connor

There's a collective knowing that a dimension of reality exists beyond the material plane, and that sense of knowing is causing a mystical resurgence on the planet today. It's not just children who are looking for a missing piece. It is a very mature outlook to question the nature of our reality. — Marianne Williamson

But he couldn't feel self-pity in the face of the memorial. He hadn't lost nearly enough as these children, who'd lost their homeland and, in many cases,their whole families. Perhaps they had gained something, too, though. They had at least escaped the concentration camps, been taken in by good, caring families, and had grown up to live their lives in relative freedom. — Peter Robinson

Stigma hurts. Because of AIDS, children are bullied, isolated and shut out of school. They are missing out on education. They are missing out on medicines. Children are missing your love, care and protection. Join me. And become a stigma buster. UNITE FOR CHILDREN UNITE AGAINST AIDS — Jackie Chan

Children don't understand, when things aren't given. The single parent struggling to provide; how they sacrifice themselves, by sweeping their dreams and goals under the table, just to bring bread and beans on the table. — Anthony Liccione

I have never once regretted missing a business opportunity so that I could be with my children and grandchildren. — Mitt Romney

I had to make a choice at one point in my life, of missing films or missing my children. It was a very easy decision to make because I missed my children so very much. — Audrey Hepburn

We moved around a lot at first as a kid, and then I was on the road at 17, and new in town by the time I got to LA, and then famous again with that whirlwind. I did really want substance in my life, and when I stopped with the road for my children, it was really because I didn't want to miss out. It wasn't just selflessness. I didn't want to miss out on that. — Lynda Carter

I want to go back to the tell-me-again times when I slept in her bed and we were everything together. When I was everything to her. Everything she needed. — Erica Lorraine Scheidt

I came back to work when my children were two months old. At that early age, they seem to have little awareness of anybody but their Raggedy Ann dolls, so it wasn't a matter of them missing me. I was missing them. — Jane Pauley

I was missing the opportunity to see my friends' children grow up, to have my son go to his friends' homes and be involved with their parents. — Karen Hughes

The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine ... While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you're making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.
It's snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing. — Charles Simic

Knowledge is the key to stopping the spread of AIDS. Yet millions of children are missing an education. Missing their teachers who have died of the disease. Missing from class as they stay home to care for their dying mothers and fathers. Children are missing your support. United for Children. Unite against AIDS. — Susan Sarandon

We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games. — Tom Bissell

Every hour spent investigating a drug user or seller is an hour that could have been used to find a missing child. — Randy Barnett

As we've discovered, we're wired for story and in the absence of data we will rely on confabulations and conspiracies. When our children sense something is wrong - maybe a sick grandparent or a financial worry - or when they know something is wrong - an argument or a work crisis - they quickly jump to filling in the missing pieces of the story. And because our well-being is directly tied to their sense of safety, fear sets in and often dictates the story. It's important that we give them as much information as is appropriate for their developmental and emotional capacity, and that we provide a safe place for them to ask questions. Emotions are contagious and when we're stressed or anxious or afraid our children can be quickly engulfed in the same emotions. More information means less fear-based story-making. — Brene Brown

The aim of education is to fit children for the position in life which they are hereafter to occupy. Boys are to be sent out intothe world to buffet with its temptations, to mingle with bad and good, to govern and direct ... girls are to dwell in quiet homes, amongst a few friends; to exercise a noiseless influence, to be submissive and retiring. There is no connection between the bustling mill-wheel life of a large school and that for which they are supposed to be preparing ... to educate girls in crowds is to educate them wrongly. — Elizabeth Missing Sewell

I recognize the amount of time that it takes as a director. I made the choice to stop taking roles outside of L.A. because I didn't want to miss any of my child's life. — Regina King

Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing. — Dennis Lehane

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing- persons reports, then moved on themselves. — Joan Didion

The system isn't working when 12 million people live in hiding, and hundreds of thousands cross our borders illegally each year; when companies hire undocumented immigrants instead of legal citizens to avoid paying overtime or to avoid a union; when communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids - when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel. When all that's happening, the system just isn't working. — Barack Obama

Children born to unwed mothers,' he said after a long silence, 'have parts of their souls missing. — Bernard Cornwell

You can read the best experts on child care. You can listen to those who have been there. You can take a whole childbirth and child-care course without missing a lesson. But you won't really know a thing about yourselves and each other as parents, or your baby as a child, until you have her in your arms. That's the moment when the lifelong process of bringing up a child into the fold of the family begins. — Stella Chess

I think there is something barbaric in children, and it's missing in lots of books for them because we don't like to think of it. We want them to be happy [but] childhood is a very tough time. — Maurice Sendak

Children with Autism aren't missing. Instead, they are off making discoveries — Jacob Barnett

Having children showed me a whole different kind of love that I had never known. It was something that had always been missing. Complete love. I would die for them. — Scott Weiland

We are, a lot of the time, baffled by the news we see on the front pages of our newspapers, often because the stories are complex, and we missed the beginning of them anyway. (How far back do we have to go to find the roots of the Euro crisis? To 2008? 1999, when the currency came into being? 1992? 1945?) That is one of the reasons why natural disasters and murders and cases involving missing children become so involving: we understand them. — Nick Hornby

Perhaps it was only that I did not feel any crazier than I had ever felt. I did not notice any missing gray tissue, I did not seem to be thinking any slower or more strangely, and so far I'd had no conversations with invisible buddies that I was aware of. Except in my sleep, of course-and did that really count? Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of the neighbor's children? — Jeff Lindsay

As is true in many families where children create enormously upsetting diversions from core family secrets, Elana's family fixed on her behavior as further proof that the secret should remain buried. When behavior is truly a distraction for the unspeakable, therapist after therapist may be brought in, each attempting to intervene at the wrong level, mistakenly addressing such signals at the biological, behavioral, intrapsychic, or interpersonal level, while completely missing the unimaginable maze of secrecy in which such actions are embedded. — Evan Imber-Black

China's one-child policy punishes families for having 'out-of-plan' children, resulting in sex-selective abortion and tens of millions of 'missing girls' as well as forced abortion and sterilization campaigns. — Chris Smith

Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn't see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That's what mothers told her: Oh, you don't know what you're missing; it's spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true
it must be true
but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She'd known too many women who'd vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who'd magically been replaced by their children and their children's desires. — Sherman Alexie

But now? Now? Children in the twentieth and this early twenty-first century hated the Alice books, couldn't read them, and why should they? Their world had strayed into madness long ago. Look at the planet. Rain is acid, poisonous. Sun causes cancer. Sex=death. Children murder other children. Parents lie, leaders lie, the churches have less moral credibility than Benetton ads.
And the faces of missing children staring out from milk cartons-imagine all those poor Lost Boys, and Lost Girls, not in Neverland but lost here, lost now. No wonder Wonderland isn't funny anymore: We live there full-time. We need a break from it. — Gregory Maguire

Ask the American public if they want an FBI wiretap and they'll say, "no." If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone that helps the FBI find their missing child they'll say, "Yes." — Louis J. Freeh

If you want to find missing children put their photo's on Soda Cans, beer cans and cigarette packs and you'll increase the odds by millions some people are lactose in tolerate. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

The one thing I regret is missing the time with my older children when they were young. — Kris Kristofferson

And then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate.
Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't. — Mordecai Richler

We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don't see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it, and in missing it, we allow the world to be destroyed. — Andrew Harvey

THOSE WHO SAID IT CAN'T BE DONE ... SHOULDN'T GET IN MY WAY WHILE I'M DOING IT! — Rosetta D. Hoessli

I'm passing the bar
Where you first got in my car
I'm not ashamed to admit
That it's you I won't forget

I saved your cigarettes and
Bad habits I regret
But the hours flew by like clouds
Whenever I had you around

Parachute lover
Take me away
From the plane that went crashing
And the earth that's in flames

Saving you is saving me
High above the redwood trees
But down below I see shadows
And parachute debris

We're drifting like children
Along for the ride
Each time we find love
Another parachute arrives

Our madness will burn
As bright as the sun
And I'll keep finding lovers
But you were the one — Crystal Woods

There's plenty to read about keeping your sanity while raising children, but it's all common-sense stuff about task division and taking breaks and the relentlessly repeated magic of date night with your spouse. What's missing is some 'tude. — Jeffrey Kluger