Once A Child Quotes & Sayings

A child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of its parents with its brothers and sisters; and it notices that the whole of their affection is lavished upon it once more whenever it arouses their anxiety by falling ill. It has now discovered a means of enticing out its parents' love and will make use of that means as soon as it has the necessary psychical material at its disposal for producing an illness. — Sigmund Freud

We don't get enough pampering. If we were once the only child of an adoring mother, we developed a taste for it; if not, we developed a thirst for it. — Barbara Holland

Some experts say we are moving back to the pre-antibiotic era. No. This will be a post-antibiotic era. In terms of new replacement antibiotics, the pipeline is virtually dry. A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child's scratched knee could once again kill. — Margaret Chan

If our poor die of hunger, it is not because God does not care for them. Rather, it is because neither you nor I are generous enough. It is because we are not instruments of love in the hands of God. We do not recognize Christ when once again He appears to us in the hungry man, in the lonely woman, in the child who is looking for a place to get warm. — Mother Teresa

Dissociative Identity Disorder...is initially a useful coping response to an environment which is very difficult to endure. The problem is that dissociative responses-such as switching, blanking out, or going into a trance-become automatic, and, once the original abusive environment has been left behind, are of little use in life and may be detrimental. — Elizabeth Howell

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails. And this is happening to the world, and I think it is very very dangerous for our future generations, those of us who believe that the world is not only necessary to us in its pristine state, but it is in itself an act of some kind of spiritual thing. I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?
[from 'A Thousand Mornings' With Poet Mary Oliver for NPR Books] — Mary Oliver

It's no good telling somebody they're trying too hard. It's very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants. — John D. MacDonald

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn't here. Before that, my parents weren't here. And before that ... — John Burnside

I was left an orphan while I was still a child, and we were very poor. Sometimes I would stand for hours on end in ecstasy outside a baker's shop, gazing with burning desire at the cakes. I would say to myself, 'These are not for me. I shall never be able to eat anything like this.' The Bible brings back these memories. Once again I can see wonderful things, but I know that they are not for me, because I am a Jew. I know that there are Jews who have converted to Christianity in order to marry Romanian girls or to escape anti-Semitic persecution. But I have not yet met a Jew who believes in Jesus. — Richard Wurmbrand

When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them. — Meg Wolitzer

She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite? I am full — Toni Morrison

I will not be spoken to in that tone," she said to her mother.
Enid's mouth gaped open. For only a moment, however, until she began to protest.
"You've gotten snippy since your marriage, haven't you? I'll not take that behavior from you, child. Your sister would never have disrespected me in such a fashion."
"Enough!" Ellice held up her hand, her gaze never once leaving her mother.
"When have you ever respected me, Mother? I'm only a poor substitute for Eudora." She took a deep breath. "I'm not Eudora," she said. "I'm not your beloved daughter who died. I'm the one who lived. I'm tired of hearing about what my sister did or would have done. I suspect that Eudora would have silenced you long before now."
She grabbed her skirts and walked around her mother, heading for the kitchen. At the door, she stopped and turned.
"Must I die before you begin to value me as well? — Karen Ranney

You remember it all now," Hatcher said, and it wasn't a question.
"Yes," she said. She was beyond weeping for the child she once was. "It is, more or less, what you would expect. Except for the part where I escaped. Nobody expected that. — Christina Henry

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated. — May Sarton

They wouldn't have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way. — Thomm Quackenbush

My mother once told me as a child that you can tell who is coming by the mere sound of their footsteps. I remember looking at her incredulously, my short curls bouncing in agreement with my dissent. Yet, upon her departure, I heard in her footsteps the essence of Mom. Ever since, I would know who was approaching down the hall of our home without prior visual identification.
And the footsteps I heard at the entrance of the bookstore carried the vague echo of a memory that promised dread. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

We had traveled far and long to get here but were still the same still-born, unreconstructed people who had once met on this landscape that began somewhere not too far south of the south and ended all the way up in the northernmost extremes of the north, and every soul begotten upon this land was a bastard child of that interminable human equation: colonizer and colony, slave and master, rapist and victim, and any pledge to loyalty and patriotism was an oath to both parts of this equation - we were the seconds obliviously turned up on the old, unregenerate battlefield, here to fight in history's redundant, never-ending duel, always carrying someone else's sword and flag in the name of the myth. — John M. Keller

He was still so very young. Faeries - true faeries, not their changeling throwaways - live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it's over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He'd never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.
But he didn't. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him. — Seanan McGuire

Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not. — Charles Horton Cooley

Shall I be able to understand the sense of what you have written?

No, King, what a poet writes is not meant to have any sense.

What then?

To have the tune itself.

What do you mean? Is there no philosophy in it?

No, none at all, thank goodness.

What does it say, then?

King, it says "I exist." Don't you know the meaning of the first cry of the new-born child? The child, when it is born, hears at once the cries of the earth and water and sky, which surround him,--and they all cry to him, "We exist," and his tiny little heart responds, and cries out in its turn, "I exist." My poetry is like the cry of that new-born child. It is a response to the cry of the Universe. — Rabindranath Tagore

When a child is given a little leeway, he will at once shout, "I want to do it!" But in our schools, which have an environment adapted to children's needs, they say, "Help me to do it alone." And these words reveal their inner needs. — Maria Montessori

Custer was a child once. He didn't spend his childhood killing Indians and stealing their homeland. Nero didn't spend his childhood burning Rome to the ground. Everybody was a child once. No child was born hating the world around him. You had to learn that trait. You had to pick it up from the worst pockets of the universe, the filthiest recesses of society, where the people who learned it before you deposited it when they were done. — Rose Christo

I know that as a very young child, I was afraid of death. Many children become aware of the notion of death early and it can be a very troubling thing. We're all in this continuum: I'm this age now, and if I live long enough I'll be that age. I was 20 once, I was 10, I was 4. People who are 20 now will be 50 one day. They don't know that! They know it in the abstract, but they don't know it. I'd like them to know it, because I think it gives you compassion. — Charlie Kaufman

The big guys like Google weren't always big. Once they were two kids in a garage. Or a dorm room. Some of them set out to be billionaires from the get-go, but some of them didn't. Some of them got just caught up in solving an interesting problem, which happened to be worth billions later. — Lee Child

In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law and in the Congo in the early 16th century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punishable brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted. The idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude.

A Congolese leader told of the Portuguese legal codes asked a Portuguese once, teasingly, 'What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground? — Howard Zinn

As a child, Kate hat once asked her mother how she would know she was in love. Her mother had said she would know she was in love when she would be willing to give up chocolate forever to be with that person for even an hour. Kate, a dedicated and hopeless chocoholic, had decided right then that she would never fall in love. She had been sure that no male was worth such privation. — Lynsay Sands

There isn't an equation that can confirm something as self-evident (to us humans) as "muggy weather is uncomfortable" or "mothers are older than their daughters." There has been some progress made in translating this sort of information into mathematical logic, but to catalog the common sense of a four-year-old child would require hundreds of millions of lines of computer code. As Voltaire once said, "Common sense is not so common. — Michio Kaku

Now the woman, she was another story. Her instinct was strong. She had sensed the darkness. But she was curious. Afraid. Soon she would return, because she had to. All she had to do was lift the lid. It would dispose of her in a little while. Once night had fallen. All it wanted was the child. — Beverley Lee

Once a child gets into your heart, there's no right or wrong about it. — M.L. Stedman

Nobody likes to let go of the ego- it is so precious to everyone. However, once you have attained a state of egolessness, the world won't disappear, as you may think it will. The world will continue, but a change takes place within you. Something is uncovered. You start seeing everything with the wonder and innocence of a child. — Mata Amritanandamayi

There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every adult was once a child free from prejudice. — Mother Teresa

If I have this child? Why wasn't it obvious to me that I already had a child, who was growing inside of me? Once you are pregnant, there is no if. That child, though tiny and in an early stage of development, already exists! — Abby Johnson

It's rigged - everything, in your favor.
So there is nothing to worry about.

Is there some position you want,
some office, some acclaim, some award, some con, some lover,
maybe two, maybe three, maybe four - all at once,

maybe a relationship
with
God?

I know there is a gold mine in you, when you find it
the wonderment of the earth's gifts
you will lay aside
as naturally as does
a child a
doll.

But, dear, how sweet you look to me kissing the unreal:
comfort, fulfill yourself,
in any way possible - do that until
you ache, until you ache,

then come to me
again. — Jalaluddin Rumi

I fold back the sheet, get carefully up, on silent bare feet, in my nightgown, go to the window, like a child, I want to see. The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow. The sky is clear but hard to make out, because of the searchlight; but yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway. I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I — Margaret Atwood

What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. Oh, it's very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on--it's what I've always demanded myself--but as a child, no, the truth is it's a war of attrition, rationality doesn't come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn't do it, then it's really a war, and it was a war between my mother and me. Only as an adult did I come to truly admire her--especially in the last, painful years of her life--for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself. — Zadie Smith

Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume. — Richard Whately

There is something poignantly pathetic in the picture of this valiant fighter - this arrogant ja-sager - this foe of men, gods and devils - being nursed and coddled like a little child. His old fierce pride and courage disappeared and he became docile and gentle. "You and I, my sister - we are happy!" he would say, and then his hand would slip out from his coverings and clasp that of the tender and faithful Lisbeth. Once she mentioned Wagner to him. "Den habe ich sehr geliebt!" he said. All his old fighting spirit was gone. He remembered only the glad days and the dreams of his youth. — H.L. Mencken

Whenever her father or grandmother asked her about pain, Marjorie would say she had never known it. As a young child, someone had told her that the scars her father wore on his face and her grandmother on her hands and feet were born of great pain. And because Marjorie had no scars that resembled those, she could never bring herself to complain of pain. Once, — Yaa Gyasi

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

There's this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.
In death Rose became Linden's parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs. — Lauren DeStefano

Good heavens above, the poor child has more freckles than there are stars in the sky! if she doesn't start using a good bleaching lotion at once, she'll never catch a good husband! -James Augustus Peregrine Pympoole-Bothame — Kerstin Gier

As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future. But I have never, ever, in all my years seen a leader so committed to delivering that better future to America's children as Hillary Clinton. — Donna Brazile

Most kids don't believe in fairy tales very long. Once they hit six or seven they put away "Cinderella" and
her shoe fetish, "The Three Little Pigs" with their violation of building codes, "Miss Muffet" and her
well-shaped tuffet - all forgotten or discounted. And maybe that's the way it has to be. To survive in the
world, you have to give up the fantasies, the make-believe. The only trouble is that it's not all
make-believe. Some parts of the fairy tales are all too real, all too true. There might not be a Red Riding
Hood, but there is a Big Bad Wolf. No Snow White, but definitely an Evil Queen. No obnoxiously cute
blond tots, but a child-eating witch ... yeah. Oh yeah. — Rob Thurman

One thing he had to give her credit for, she'd never called it a Relationship.
"What is it then, hey," he'd asked once.
"A secret," with her small child's smile, which like Rodgers and Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous. — Thomas Pynchon

Do you think you were locked in a cupboard as a child? Cecilia had asked him once (she wouldn't have put it past his mother), but he said he was pretty sure he wasn't. — Liane Moriarty

I don't like cleaning or dusting or cooking or doing dishes, or any of those things," I explained to her. "And I don't usually do it. I find it boring, you see."
"Everyone has to do those things," she said.
"Rich people don't," I pointed out.
Juniper laughed, as she often did at things I said in those early days, but at once became quite serious.
"They miss a lot of fun," she said. "But quite apart from that
keeping yourself clean, preparing the food you are going to eat, clearing it away afterward
that's what life's about, Wise Child. When people forget that, or lose touch with it, then they lose touch with other important things as well."
"Men don't do those things."
"Exactly. Also, as you clean the house up, it gives you time to tidy yourself up inside
you'll see. — Monica Furlong

I promise you, Cole Bridge, that in honor of the little child you once were, I will never forget that JB is a gift from God. I will honor his unique, gorgeous person with enough love for both him and the memory of a little boy who deserved so much more than he got, for as long as I live and beyond."
She kissed his lips.
"Amen."
He held her close and kissed her hard, her tears salty on both of their lips. "You are so much. I have no words."
"I know," she said. "I feel that way about you too. — Debra Anastasia

To show a child what has once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own, so that there is now a double delight seen in the glow of trust and affection, this is happiness. — J.B. Priestley

Once I had wondered what it would be like to be an adult. I thought, like all children, that adulthood was accompanied by esoteric secrets, complicated insights, mysteriously acquired skills. But it turned out to be very simple: you were exactly the same, you were still a child, but you had to find a way to look after yourself. — Edeet Ravel

How can we help a child change from undependable to dependable, from a mediocre student to a capable student, from someone who won't amount to very much to someone who will count for something. The answer is at once both simple and complicated: We treat a child as if he already is what we would like him to become. — Haim Ginott

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. — Diane Setterfield

When we prioritize and focus and that becomes the anchor the relationship becomes the anchor and it trumphs everything else than it's at once freeing and anxiety relieving because the connection itself feeds empowerment and self-worth and self-esteem so it takes away the anxiety of raising a child. — Shefali Tsabary

There are really good reasons to leave the workforce or work less or take a different job when you want to be with your children. I just want women - and men - to make that choice once they have the child. Not years in advance, because ... they don't get the right opportunities. They give up before they even start. — Sheryl Sandberg

A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio.
That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own instinct.
Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc, and came back looking for them now. The primitive moon that had once looked down on terraced heathen cities and human sacrifices. The moon of Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

If by force you make a creature live and work like a beast, you must think of him as a beast, else empathy would drive you mad. Once you have classified him in your mind, your feelings are safe. And if your heart has human vestiges of courage and anger, which in a man are virtues, then you have fear of a dangerous beast, and since your heart has intelligence and inventiveness and the ability to conceal them, you live with terror. Then you must crush his manlike tendencies and make of him the docile beast you want. And if you can teach your child from the beginning about the beast, he will not share your bewilderment. — John Steinbeck

Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do? — Mark Steyn

We can put it this way: the man who has faith is the man who is no longer looking at himself and no longer looking to himself. He no longer looks at anything he once was. He does not look at what he is now. He does not even look at what he hopes to be as the result of his own efforts. He looks entirely to the Lord Jesus Christ and His finished work, and rests on that alone. He has ceased to say, "Ah yes, I used to commit terrible sins but I have done this and that." He stops saying that. If he goes on saying that, he has not got faith. Faith speaks in an entirely different manner and makes a man say, "Yes I have sinned grievously, I have lived a life of sin, yet I know that I am a child of God because I am not resting on any righteousness of my own; my righteousness is in Jesus Christ and God has put that to my account. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her. — Catherynne M Valente

Sonnet: To the River Otter

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together. — Beryl Markham

A good friend of mine once said, I have never met a bigot who was a reader as a child. — Marion Dane Bauer

When you opened the door a bell tinkled, but just once, high and clear and small in the neat obscurity above the door, as though it were gauged and tempered to make that single clear small sound so as not to wear the bell out nor to require the expenditure of too much silence in restoring it when the door opened upon the recent warm scent of baking; a little dirty child with eyes like a toy bear's and two patent-leather pigtails. — William Faulkner

The best fights are the ones you don't have, a wise man once said to me. — Lee Child

A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father. — Halldor Laxness

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying — David Sheff

hI was following through on the mountain commitment from my younger days, and it's always a nice surprise when the newly minted adult doesn't disown the child he once was. — Erhard Loretan

The actual tragedy of Emmett Till, he had told her once, was not the murder of a black child for whistling at a white woman but that some black people thought: But why did you whistle? — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Winter again. The summer people have gone. The early morning walks are solitary once more. Fog wraps the ocean and sky like a wet, gray glove. Sprinting through the frosty dune grass, my dog Buddy emerges soaked and grinning. He's become a man-child, his boundless puppy love and mindless exuberance caroming off the walls in a muscular body. He lives by one rule: To be alive is to be gloriously happy. Not a bad way to be, I often remind myself.

Comfortable in the ebb and flow of each other's idiosyncracies and needs, he keeps me company while I work, I join him often in his play. His unflagging high spirits urge me to cram activity and joy into every waking moment as he does. By so doing, I tell myself, I will multiply my allotted time by dog years and dilate the remaining seasons accordingly. A good way to look at life, I figure. — Lionel Fisher

He must love you very much,' Gavril said once I had my footing.
I couldn't look at him. 'What makes you say that?' Gavril sighed. 'I've known Maxon since he was a child. He's never stood up to his father like that. — Kiera Cass

BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. — Salman Rushdie

We mothers can testify that it is impossible to completely control a child. It's like trying to steer a cat. Toni sorenson — Toni Sorenson

Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child's. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I hate to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves, she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her...and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace...she has nothing...she expects nothing...' A tear at last sneaks from Henry's eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard. — Hilary Mantel

A baseball manager has learned a lot about his job from having played the game, but a parent has not learned a thing from having once been a child. — Bill Cosby

Landmines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian - a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal. — Jody Williams

When I was a child of six or seven my father would show me the chapter in the prophet Isaiah where the name Immanuel is found; more than once he spoke to me of the faith he put in me. — Immanuel Velikovsky

Since then, I have realized that my tree had been a child once too. The embryo that became my tree sat on the ground for years, caught between the danger of waiting too long and the danger of leaving the seed too early. — Hope Jahren

Every time I make a new game, I put all of my effort completely into that game. It's like putting all your effort into a new child that's being born. Once the project is done, I can step back and look at it objectively, which is when I can see a lot of flaws. That's when I start to make a new game that tries to fix some of those flaws. — Hideo Kojima

Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city-here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call. Once every hour a volcano erupts in light and flame. Once every hour a pirate ship sinks a man o'war. — Neil Gaiman

Small child once you were a hope, a dream. Now you are a reality. Changing all that is to come. A love to hold our hearts forever. — Charlotte Gray

I'll never truly understand what it's like to be anyone but a white man in the United States. For all of my self-imposed distance from the status quo, I'll never be able to get my head around being the product of generations of hardship. The most brutal chattel slavery in human history. I'll never comprehend being penned up in an impoverished reservation on land that was once sovereign domain. I'll never know how it feels to be denied because of the color of your skin or because of where you came from. To have to watch your children suffer the same fate. But I still try to understand - by studying the history that the victors didn't write, and interacting with my fellow human beings. Finding out what their favorite color is. Asking what they daydreamed about as a child. Sharing laughs. Discovering the person. I — Arno Michaelis

Over at our place, we're sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don't think of grown-ups, and we don't think of children. But just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us, that maybe the world has made us forget. — Walt Disney Company

According to St. Augustine, the left hand represented the temporal, the mortal, and the bodily, as opposed to the right, which stood for "God, eternity, the years of God which fail not."25 For centuries the preference for the right hand over the left governed how people fished, ploughed fields, twisted rope, and ate their meals. The Greeks and Romans, for example, always reclined on the left side, propped on the left elbow, leaving the right hand free for the business of eating and drinking. Plutarch noted that parents taught children to eat right-handed from a young age, and "if they do put forth the left hand, at once we correct them."26 The prejudice against the left hand persisted during the Renaissance, with parents freeing a child's right hand from its swaddling clothes to ensure right-handedness at the dinner table as well as at the writing desk. — Ross King

Such innocent confusions are like cognitive magic-eye posters. Most of the time it's impossible to go back to the jumbled mess once you've registered the picture. Sex is the exception. So natural and universal is a child's curiosity about sex and so long are we conscious of it before we do it, that our origical impressions of it leave an indelible mark. — Sloane Crosley

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others. — Lisa Unger

By the altar, which is made of massive slabs of stone untouched by tools since hewn from the quarry and set up in this vast edifice, a barefooted priest wearing a linen tunic waits for the Levite to hand over the turtledoves. He takes the first one, carries it to a comer of the altar, and with a single blow knocks the head from its body. [ ... ] Joseph has nothing more to accomplish here, he must withdraw, collect his wife and child, and return home. Mary is pure once more, not in the strict sense of the word, because purity is something to which most human beings, and above all women, can scarcely hope to aspire. — Jose Saramago

For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme - of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme - pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when we despair, that there is an underlying logic about it, that was understood once and can be understood again. — Neal Stephenson

Any child can be taught to be beautifully behaved with no effort greater than quiet patience and perseverance, whereas to break bad habits once they are acquired is a Herculean task. — Emily Post

Once in a great while, she was distressed by the way she looked. As she was rounding the bend to forty she would write to Avis DeVoto that whenever she read Vogue she "felt like a frump....but I suppose that is the purpose of all of it, to shame people out of their frumpery so they will go out and buy 48 pairs of red shoes, have a facial, pat themselves with deodorizers, buy a freezer, and put up the new crispy window curtains with a draped valence."
Julia was able to deconstruct the disingenuous motives that drive women's magazines with the ease she normally reserved for deboning a duck, seeing quite clearly that while ostensibly offering inspiration and useful advice, the stories and articles quietly pummel the reader's sense of self, the better to drive her into the arms of the advertisers. — Karen Karbo

The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero once said: 'Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. — Ha-Joon Chang

Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the blame. — Susan Forward

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for war seem to know who did it or where to look for them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed
for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it off. — Hunter S. Thompson

The more experience you have, the more interesting cooking is because you know what can happen to the food. In the beginning you can look at a chicken and it doesn't mean much, but once you have done some cooking you can see in that chicken a parade of things you will be able to create. — Julia Child

A child who was born with a silver spoon is likely to not appreciate all he is provided with.
And it is likely that a child who grew up from the dust to look down on others once the floods gate of success opens up for him.
It is NOT where you come FROM that matters,
But where you are GOING. — Nomthandazo Tsembeni

Author Elizabeth Stone once said, Making a decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. — John Medina

Once you get to your forties or fifties in this society, very few people haven't had at least one body blow - financial, bankruptcy, divorce, relationship disaster, addiction, trouble with a child, trouble with a parent. Most people take some blow. — Marianne Williamson

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.

What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live. — Matthew Sanford

I'm pretty low-maintenance, but I like my time to myself, and once you have a child, you have to fight for it. I remember the first long bath I took [after Ptolemy's birth] was such a moment. Because a lot of the time you're in the shower, and if that baby cries, you've got to turn off the water and go! — Gretchen Mol

As a child, young William alarmed his parents by reporting that he experienced visions. In later life he told his friends that he had seen angels among the haymakers in the fields, which still lay in easy walking distance from Broad Street. when he got home and reported the vision, he barely escaped a thrashing for telling a lie. More disturbingly, his wife once remarked, "You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old and he put his head to the window and set you screaming. — Leo Damrosch

the Christmas tree. Do you know where that comes from?" "No idea." "Saint Boniface decided to 'christianize' a ritual intended to honor the god Odin when he was a child. Once a year, the Germanic tribes would place presents around an oak tree for the children to find. They thought this would bring joy to the pagan deity. — Paulo Coelho