Orphanage Quotes & Sayings

Look, this boy's been kicked around all his life. You know-living in a slum, his mother dead since he was nine. He spent a year and a half in an orphanage while his father served a jail term for forgery. That's not a very good head start. He's had a pretty terrible sixteen years. I think maybe we owe him a few words. That's all. — Reginald Rose

I'd tell my mother to, you know, go you-know-what herself and I would go help those children. They're in an orphanage and they've got family! That's sickening. What does John do? Nothing. His kids are in an orphanage... and he does nothing.
~ Michelle Jarvis — Gregg Olsen

He looked like an angelic little boy who had been kicked out of his orphanage for failing to take part in group masturbation. — Charles Wright

The world is an orphanage for grownups — Elizabeth Swados

I'd like to open an animal orphanage in Kenya. I do a lot of work for Born Free. — Rachel Hunter

So my father grew up in an orphanage in Boston. He was then adopted by an elderly childless couple from Maine, who gave him the name of Mitchell. He moved to Maine, and there he met my mother and was married. — George J. Mitchell

It took her three seconds-one, two, three-to know that her destiny required her to join this man, and his gun and his wagon, and his waiting horses. She had no conception of what was being asked of her, but she knew that there could be no viable alternative. She dashed inside the orphanage and grabbed the few things that belonged to her. — James A. Michener

Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the street trying to find enough to eat, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down to defeat. — Charlie Chaplin

When the next Saturday came around everyone was a little nervous, but the Red Dragon was pretty quiet that day and only ate an Orphanage. — E. Nesbit

And of course anyone who could see him here now, with his fever and his sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port and his bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too. But he isn't. He knows he isn't, in spite of everything. He has the syndrome now, the thing that came after every test subject from that Gainesville orphanage, but he isn't crazy. Just obsessed. And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can differentiate, so he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn't him. It reminds him of having a sore tooth, or the way he felt once when he was in love and didn't want to be. How his tongue always found the tooth, or how he'd always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the beloved. But — William Gibson

And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good. — Khaled Hosseini

If you're looking at the Bible for a guide to living a compassionate, wise and humane life, well, frankly you've got more chance of finding a lap dancing club in Mekka or a virgin in a catholic orphanage. — Pat Condell

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression American and his search for light both metaphorical and real. Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I've read in years. — Lucius Shepard

Moments later, from the orphanage roof, a creature made of Christmas nightmares and holding a bulging sack that looked to hold doll-shaped toys made its escape through the silhouette of the city, not to be seen for another year. — Sebastian Gregory

You know I started an orphanage so totally by accident. A lady came to me and asked me if I would, I will help her and we start it with little school and then I fell in love with it. — Oscar De La Renta

Better to build orphanages than prisons. — James Cook

WHEN STARLING was a child she moved from a clapboard house that groaned in the wind to the solid redbrick of the Lutheran Orphanage. — Thomas Harris

no doubt, the early traumatic shocks that young hardy brown experienced had a permanent impact on his future development and capacity to deal with the real world.... the years with the mighty mites within the orphanage setting, a term that we seldom see in modern society, provided him with a safe and non-threatening enclave with which to develop. certainly, the competitive, action-oriented game of football, as meshed with positive team experiences, added to the supportive culture. — Jim Dent

As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans, I was the bugler of the institution. When I got to be around 13 or 14 years old, they took me off the bugle and put me in the little brass band. — Louis Armstrong

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

My son, who is five, was adopted from Ethiopia. My daughter was adopted from Guatemala. Her parents died of typhoid and malaria. We got her from an orphanage. They are the lights of my life. — Lisa Kristine

My favorite of my books is DAVE AT NIGHT, because it's loosely based on my father's childhood in an orphanage. — Gail Carson Levine

There is no excuse for cruelty, but--at an orphanage--perhaps we are obliged to withhold love; if you fail to withhold love at an orphanage, you will create an orphanage that no orphan will willingly leave. You will create a Homer Wells--a true orphan, because his only home will always be at St. Cloud's. — John Irving

My father, who was a sergeant in the RAF during the Second World War, was killed in a hitchhiking accident while returning home on compassionate leave. As a result, my mother had to get work, as a nurse, and at seven the RAF put me into a boarding school and ex-orphanage called the Royal Wolverhampton School. — Eric Idle

Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, 'Would you take my son with you?' He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die. — Bono

Sometimes you wake up, and there's a little voice inside your head that tells you that today is a special day. For a lot of kids, it sometimes happens on their birthday, and always on Christmas morning.
I remember exactly one of those Christmases, when I was little and my dad was still alive. I felt it again, eight or nine years later, the morning that Justin Demourn came to pick me up from the orphanage. I felt it one more time the morning Justin brought Elaine home from whatever orphanage she had been in.
And now, the little voice was telling me to wake up. That it was a special day.
My little voice is some kind of psycho. — Jim Butcher

I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor. — Bryce Courtenay

New rules - we needed new rules. No one opens the main doors but me. No one leaves the property without me. No one goes outside without letting me know. I had these horrible images in my head of kids being restrained against their wills, of kids crying my name out, begging me to help them when I was powerless. Desperate times ... Lord, my soul called out. Lord ... somehow that's as far as I could get. I didn't have the words. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Rachel had been worried she couldn't remember what Sam looked like; now she worried he wouldn't recognize her. — Kim Van Alkemade

Santa Teresa is a convent that doubles as an orphanage for girls. I'm now the oldest out of thirty-seven, a distinction I've held for six months, after the last girl who turned eighteen left. At eighteen we must all make the choice to strike out on our own or to forge a life within the Church. — Pittacus Lore

Last time I was in Jamaica I financed a teacher to teach in an orphanage. — Ziggy Marley

Hear, hear.' Sister Martha hoisted her water glass. 'Let the rigid stick of self-righteousness be dislodged from her very uptight ass.'
Father Ramon coughed.
'A-fucking-men,' Loup supplied helpfully. — Jacqueline Carey

When I was three years old, I went to an orphanage, but because of the beatings, I ran away when I was five and lived alone by selling gum on the streets. For ten years, I lived like a fly. I was eventually able to graduate elementary and middle school through qualification examinations and the first thing that I ever liked was music. — Choi Sung-bong

He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate. — Katherine Boo

Hen a war ends, what does that look like exactly?
do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves?
does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother?
when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glass
and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at
does the white flag make for a perfect blindfold?
yesterday i was told a story
about this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old,
who cannot fall asleep
because when she does
she dreams of nothing
but the day she watched her dog
eat her neighbor's corpse.
if you told her war is over
do you think she can sleep? — Andrea Gibson

When they asked Jack Benny to do something for the Actor's Orphanage - he shot both his parents and moved in. — Bob Hope

Orphanages are the only places that ever left me feeling empty and full at the same time. — John M. Simmons

I understand that smoking is vaguely inappropriate in certain situations. You know, like an orphanage, cancer ward, whatever. — Greg Proops

I decided it was well past time to take him home and place him in bosom of his family. If you had rather I put him in an orphanage, I fully understand. — Cassandra Clare

I was a sickly baby, and after two sets of adoptive parents took me home, they returned me to the orphanage because of a serious respiratory infection. But as they say, the third time's a charm, because my mom and dad adopted me and took me into their home where I was raised in a family full of love. — Rodney Atkins

The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. The word alone would set my chin trembling. I would beg and grieve and he would allow that I deserved another chance. — Katherine Dunn

I'm not sure I ever met an American teacher in Korea that hadn't volunteered at an orphanage at least once - even our resident idiot could be surprisingly decent on occasion - but I've also visited foreign countries where children are taught hatred. I've seen it up close and personal. It's antithetical to everything I believe in as a teacher. The mandate for all teachers is to instill hope, not fear and hatred. — Tucker Elliot

My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets. — Gregory Corso

Quit worrying so much about the boards and nails of your life. Focus on the stuff that lasts. He glanced through the window toward the glowing light of the kitchen where Meg and my mom were laughing about something. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Bach felt the beauty and sadness of the moment. These men who defied the power of the Russian heavy artillery, these coarse, hardened soldiers who were dispirited by their lack of ammunition and tormented by vermin and hunger had all understood at once that what they needed more than anything in the world was not bread, not bandages, not ammunition, but these tiny branches twined with useless tinsel, these orphanage toys. — Vasily Grossman

My mother hated me. Once she took me to an orphanage and told me to mingle — Phyllis Diller

To see change in your own area code is very powerful. There's a little orphanage down the street from my company, and we donate $1 from the sale of each CD we sell to the orphanage. — Henry Rollins

Inside a home you left me, a blue orphanage.
Inside a bluish mosaic, space to live. — Heng Siok Tian

Oh my gosh," Somer whispers, one hand flying up to her mouth. "She's beautiful."
Krishnan fumbles with the papers and reads, "Asha. That's her name. Ten months old."
"What does it mean?" she asks.
"Asha? Hope." He looks up at her, smiling. "It means hope."
"Really?" She gives a little laugh, crying as well. "Well, she must be ours then."
She grasps his hand, intertwining their fingers, and kisses him.
"That's perfect, really perfect."
She rests her head on his shoulder as they stare at the photo together.
For the first time in a very long time, Somer feels a lightness in her chest. How can it be I'm already in love with this child, half a world away? The next morning, they send a telegram to the orphanage, stating they are coming to get their daughter. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible threat.....The counselor couldn't prove otherwise. — Noorilhuda

My mother found a letter, though, that I wrote her when I was 8 years old and it was a letter where I asked if she could take me to the orphanage because I would like to adopt a little baby. — Kristen Stewart

Serving [Hamilton's] legacy didn't just mean commemorating him, though: It also meant continuing his work. [Eliza] crusaded against slavery, as Hamilton had. And this widow of an orphan helped to found the first private orphanage in New York. That's the real power of a legacy: We tell stories of people who are gone because like any powerful stories, they have the potential to inspire, and to change the world. — Jeremy McCarter

There are many children who need help, and anyone who wants to reach out and adopt a child from foster care or from a Russian orphanage should reach out and do it. — Melissa Fay Greene

I've seen far too many Christians who are more than willing to travel halfway around the world to volunteer for a week in an orphanage, but who cannot bring themselves to take the personal risk of sharing Jesus with the co-worker who sits day after day in the cubicle right next to them. — Lee Strobel

We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch "Christian" cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right "worldview" talking points. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of "groanings too deep for words" (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are. — Russell D. Moore

At least you pay for them."
"I could support a foundling hospital, and you would applaud my virtue."
"I didn't expect you to populate your own orphanage," she said. — Eloisa James

F. once said: At sixteen I stopped fucking faces. I had occasioned the remark by expressing disgust at his latest conquest, a young hunchback he had met while touring an orphanage. F. spoke to me that day as if I were truly one of the underprivileged; or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all when he muttered: Who am I to refuse the universe? — Leonard Cohen

I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged; she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world. — Marilyn Monroe

that He is committed to meeting our needs, but not our wants. That concept comes in reaction to those who have taken the wonderful Gospel and made it a self-centered lifestyle, in which we use the name of God, along with His principles, to get what we want. While that is a tragic misuse of Scripture, so is the concept that God cares only for our needs. He is not the director of an orphanage, guaranteeing us three meals a day and a cot to sleep on at night. He is a Father who delights in His children by becoming involved in their dreams. He fulfills dreams and desires out of His nature. It is who He is. — Bill Johnson

I never waited 27 years, because 27 years ago I was just born. My parents never told me, 'If you don't win Roland Garros we take you to the orphanage. — Roger Federer

Vivien felt at peace with the world as she walked away from the tattered, run down orphanage. The donation of the female robots, gifts and money she'd donated would enhance and change the children's lives, futures and provide them witj opportunities. She wasn't a Saint or a martyr but she concluded, perhaps somewhere below her hard exterior, formed through the necessity of hustling to provide for herself, perhaps there was a compassionate, unselfish person with a deep empathetic nature, that had never truly been allowed to exist or realized until this moment in time. — Jill Thrussell

When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run ... — Russell D. Moore

Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stations
We crossed cities that turn-tabled all day
And vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager") — Pierre Albert-Birot

This is the one who will find us. He's the one who will lead them all back to me someday. He's the explorer. El curioso. — Sandra Rodriguez Barron

CRUEL HARVEST by Fran Elizabeth Grubb is a compelling, riveting, unforgetable memoir that will keep you turning the pages. Published by Thomas Nelson and due for release August 2012. Kidnapped from an orphanage Frances is dragged across the country working in the fields. Youtubefrangrubb to see video book trailer. — Fran Elizabeth Grubb

I ended up in Broadmeadows orphanage - I don't know how that happened - whether she gave me up for adoption or the church was responsible. Whatever happened, she was a single mum. — Kerry Stokes

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents. — Thomas Bernhard

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor, he looked sideways but said okay. — Harvey Fierstein

I went to a number of foreign countries, and during whenever I went, I would try to go to an orphanage or a home for children. And I was seeing thousands of kids around the world that needed homes. — Sam Brownback

I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, 'You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.'
'Okay,' I said.
'Really,' my dad said. 'I wouldn't bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you're worth, we'd just toss you out on the streets.'
'We're not sentimental people,' Mom added, deadpan. 'We'd leave you at an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas. — John Green

That seemed to be a feature of life in the country [Malawi]: to welcome strangers, to let them live out their fantasy of philanthropy - a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria eradication program, or a church; and then determine if in any of this effort and expense there was a side benefit - a kickback, a bribe, an easy job, a free vehicle. If the scheme didn't work - and few of them did work - whose fault was that? Whose idea was it in the first place? — Paul Theroux

When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it. — Wayne Dyer

My pacifism came after I joined the army and was shipped over to Korea. There was a little one-room orphanage there called Song-do. There were 180 babies in there, and they were GI babies. The U.S. government would not acknowledge this, and the Korean government had nothing to do with them. They were living on a 100-pound bag of rice a month. Some of those kids, when they were old enough, would go out and shine shoes. They would show up at the gate of our compound to shine shoes, and you'd swear they were looking for their fathers. — Utah Phillips

The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud. — Lucy Larcom

Oh. Now you are not so afraid, then?"
Kitty opened her mouth, indignant. "I was not afraid before! I was... shocked. How many times do you see your orphanage roommate be able to turn someone into stone?"
"Every time I look in the mirror. — Ana Franco

Okay; they've got to be kids - but why girls?" Fontaine asked. "People are even more protective about little girls." Tenenbaum winced and turned back to the microscope, muttering, "For some reason girls take sea-slug implant better than boys." Fontaine wondered what little boy they'd experimented on to determine that and what had become of him. But he didn't really care. He didn't. And in fact - there was one place that could supply children for all sorts of things. "So - just girls, eh? That's okay; that'll just be fewer bunks in the orphanage. — John Shirley

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane's time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself - all those turn out to be as important to a child's development as all but the most basic food and shelter. — Gloria Steinem

I want to grow up and do something cool with my life, such as build an orphanage in a third world country like all those saintly Hollywood celebrities. That or, like, cause a scandal and become mega-famous. — Shirley Marr

I can remember staring at the orphanage and feeling envy. — George Carlin

My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly. — Eric Idle

My mother left me for seven years in an orphanage. — Vidal Sassoon

My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school. — Robert Wilson

A man who has grown up in an orphanage cannot take a dog to the pound.

Even if it is a Chihuahua. — Karin Slaughter

Learn how to grow out of yourself and into the world of others: Plant a shade tree under which you know you will never sit. Set some goals that may benefit your children or an orphanage or the employees of your company or future generations or your own city, fifty years from now. — Denis Waitley

I understood now: how nothing looked more beautiful than that scar of his, that borderline that separated what Jacob could have been had he stayed in that orphanage from who he is. — Justina Chen

With all the chaos, pain and suffering in the world, the fact that my adoption of a child from who was living in an orphanage, you know, was the number one story for a week in the world. To me, that says more about our inability to focus on the real problems. — Madonna Ciccone

adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutions' general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children's forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words. I — Masha Gessen

Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines. — Anthony Doerr

They projected an illusion of warmth with their home-cooking and hand-stitched quilts, yet underneath the facade was an institutional rigidity, as if they were running an orphanage where children would be fed and cared for but never loved. Love was such a key ingredient in molding humans, yet it was inaccessible to kids inside of the system. — Renee Carlino

Orphanage 127, Sector D, sub-district 28, Zone 7, the city of Plexus, Continental Center, Earth, 3,914 years after the End of the Age of the Uzgen. — Damian Wampler

Unforgettable experiences are generally worth splurging on; unlike stuff, memories don't wear out (or take up space, get dusty, break, or get stolen). If you really want to go and work at an orangutan orphanage in Borneo, it will be worth the cash. — Rosie Blythe

You often hear attacks on international adoption as robbing a child of his or her culture, and that's both true and false. It's true that an internationally adopted child loses the rich background of history and religion and culture and language that the child was born into, but the cruel fact is that most children don't have access to the local, beautiful culture within an orphanage. — Melissa Fay Greene

The earth is a great big orphanage for most animals. — Eric Roberts

They dumped him in the orphanage as dust and dirt swirled in fierce desert winds howling like jackals. It was a day when hawks flew against the wind without making headway, hovering over him, preparing for the kill. As if he were their helpless prey. And that was how he felt. Helpless. — I.J. Sarfeh

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me - I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had "borrowed" from her class at school. And then there was L.A. - all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different. — Paula Stokes

I hadn't been left on the doorstep of an orphanage or church. I wasn't abandoned in some frilly basket by a tearful mother. Even that was too romantic of a story for me. I was left in a trashcan. Meant to die, I figured. — R.K. Lilley

How funny is it that so many professors labeled Tea Partiers as terrorists, while kissing the asses of real, bona fide terrorists? It's not funny, really. But it's the result of a simple equation: One is cool, and the other isn't. Own a gun and keep it by your bed in your remote farmhouse? You're a redneck. Purchase guns that end up killing a judge? Priceless. As long as you cling to cool, progressive beliefs that deem America evil, whatever you do is cool. And if you do it under a big fuzzy 'fro? Even cooler. Hell, if you 'fro is big enough, you could nuke an orphanage and still get tenure. — Greg Gutfeld

And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I have no definable history before I was abandoned and taken in by the orphanage in Hong Kong. I truly am a blank sheet. I have been disconnected from my ancestors. I don't know who they are, where they came from or whether any of their line still exists. The ancestral umbilical cord that would have connected me to my past and linked me to my future, was permanently severed. It cannot be reattached — Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen

When you build an orphanage in a poor community, you create orphans. — Sara Brinton