Orphan Children Quotes & Sayings

I started reading Dickens when I was about 12, and I particularly liked all of the orphan books. I always liked books about young people who are left on their own with the world, and the four children's books I've written feature that very thing: children that are abandoned by their families or running away from their families or ignored by their families and having to grow up quicker than they should, like David Copperfield - having to be the hero of their own story. — John Boyne

The home is the most ritualized place in a society; each house is like a religious order with its own ceremonies. — Heather O'Neill

If anybody understands God's order for his children, it's someone who has rescued an orphan from despair, for that is what God has done for us. God has adopted you. God sought you, found you, signed the papers and took you home. — Max Lucado

We probably looked like starving orphan children. Hey! We were starving orphan children. — James Patterson

When a child loses his parent, they are called an orphan. When a spouse loses her or his partner, they are called a widow or widower. When parents lose their child, their isn't a word to describe them. This month recognizes the loss so many parents experience across the United States and around the world. It is also meant to inform and provide resources for parents who have lost children due to miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, stillbirths, birth defects, SIDS, and other causes. — Ronald Reagan

At some level you remain an orphan for life; looking after children is one way of looking after yourself. — Ian McEwan

It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world. — Adolf Hitler

When I was little I knew my father had been an orphan and had lived in an orphanage. I was curious, but my father wouldn't satisfy my curiosity. He told only one story about the orphanage, and that was of sneaking out and buying candy, which he sold to other orphans. He said he had a pretty good business going
till he was busted! I guess he told that anecdote because he was the hero of it and I suspect he was rarely the hero as a child, more often the victim. There's a photo of the actual orphanage on my website, and you can see it's a forbidding looking place. — Gail Carson Levine

Harry's status as orphan gives him a freedom other children can only dream about (guiltily, of course). No child wants to lose their parents, yet the idea of being removed from the expectations of parents is alluring. The orphan in literature is freed from the obligation to satisfy his/her parents, and from the inevitable realization that his/her parents are flawed human beings. There is something liberating, too, about being transported into the kind of surrogate family which boarding school represents, where the relationships are less intense and the boundaries perhaps more clearly defined. — J.K. Rowling

A music born among children of slaves is like an orphan: it will never know its real parents, will never hear the full visceral story of its birth. — Carolina De Robertis

had two reasons. Ned was by himself in this world, except for me, and I didn't want no man and no children spiting him just because he was an orphan. The other reason I never looked at a man, I was barren. An old woman on the place had told me that. I went to her one day and told her how my body act and didn't act. After we had sat down and talked a while, she said one word: "Barren." I went to a doctor and he told me the same thing: "You barren, all right. — Ernest J. Gaines

The Holocaust distorts the future vision of the mother-child dual union at the level of reality for both parties. Mothers do not see that they can securely bring up their children, and the children becoming mothers and fathers anticipate the fate of their parents. Prolonging their orphan state they remain childless. — Terez Virag

Orphans? Would you really? Adopt children?"
"There are advantages. If they turn out badly, we can blame their natural parents. We can also choose our own assortment of ages and genders. We can even get them ready-grown, if we wish. — Loretta Chase

I always questioned if I was CALLED to adopt, but then I realized no child was ever CALLED to be an orphan. — David Platt

In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, unprecedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one's flesh and blood, especially one's children. — James Baldwin

For my sake," he said firmly, addressing the air in front of him as though it were a tribunal, "I dinna want ye to bear another child. I wouldna risk your loss, Sassenach," he said, his voice suddenly husky. "Not for a dozen bairns. I've daughters and sons, nieces and nephews, grandchildren - weans enough."

He looked at me directly then, and spoke softly.

"But I've no life but you, Claire."

He swallowed audibly, and went on, eyes fixed on mine.

"I did think, though . . . if ye do want another child . . . perhaps I could still give ye one. — Diana Gabaldon

Some addicts do not even have basic parenting and instead are beaten, sexually abused, left to be looked after by a dysfunctional 'carer', put in orphan homes or rejected by their community. If you calculate the millions of emotionally neglected children and observe them growing up together trying to 'get by in life', you will understand why many adults (adult children) have addictive personalities. — Christopher Dines

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don't believe that old people can feel that they are orphans. — Agnes Varda

These concerns (for orphan children in India and elsewhere in the world) are very good, but often these same people are not concerned with the millions that are killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers ... — Mother Teresa

The orphan in children's literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?' - it is about finding your place in the world. — Brian Selznick

ORPHAN TRAIN is a specifically American story of mobility and rootlessness, highlighting a little-known but historically significant moment in our country's past. Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains transported more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children - many — Christina Baker Kline

When we ignore the prostituted child, we actually lend our hand to their abuse. When we ignore the widow and the orphan in their distress, we actually add to their pain. When we ignore the slave who remains captive, it's us who is entrapping them. When we forget the refugee, it's actually us who is displacing them. When we choose not to help the poor and the needy, we actually rob them. Perhaps the only fair thing to say is that when we forsake the lives of others, we actually forsake our own. — Joel Houston

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

Other resources I relied on during my orphan train research were the Children's Aid Society; the New York Foundling (I attended their 140th homecoming in 2009 and met a number of train riders there); the New York Tenement Museum; — Christina Baker Kline

Late children are early orphans. — John Wilmot

Upon the decease [of] my wife, it is my Will and desire th[at] all the Slaves which I hold in [my] own right, shall receive their free[dom] ... The Negroes thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read and write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other poor Children. And I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. — George Washington

We did a show called The Orphan Train, during the depression, when families didn't have enough money to support their children, they'd put them on the train and hope someone would pick them up who had enough money to support their children. — Robert Stack

Every child of God is not called by the Lord to establish schools and orphan houses and to trust in the Lord for means for them. Yet, there is no reason why you may not experience, far more abundantly than we do now, His willingness to answer the prayers of His children. — George Muller

Dear Judy: Your letter is here. I have read it twice, and with amazement. Do I understand that Jervis has given you, for a Christmas present, the making over of the John Grier Home into a model institution, and that you have chosen me to disburse the money? Me - I, Sallie McBride, the head of an orphan asylum! My poor people, have you lost your senses, or have you become addicted to the use of opium, and is the raving of two fevered imaginations? I am exactly as well fitted to take care of one hundred children as to become the curator of a zoo. — Jean Webster

I recall an 18-year-old girl named Rachel in Zambia who was given a grant to start a business of her choosing. She decided to breed goats so she could sell the meat and the milk, and donate the kids to orphan children. She herself was an orphan, stepping into young adulthood with no resources, and it was her first opportunity to earn her own money. — Ann Cotton

There are no words to describe the pain of burying a child, and specifically there is no word to label their new, lifelong status. If you lose a spouse, you are a widow; if you lose a parent, you are an orphan. But what about when you lose a child? How do you name something you cannot comprehend? — Lisa Belkin

Virtue is the daughter of Religion; Repentance, her adopted child,
a poor orphan who, without the asylum which she offers, would not know where to hide her sole treasure, her tears! — Sophie Swetchine