When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
There was the human body, which was so clearly designed to want babies--and then there was the human mind, which was so confused about the matter.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
He often marvelled at the extremes of discomfort and misery that children were expected to endure without the slightest squeak of protest or complaint.
The human child—so much cannier at times than the stupefyingly ponderous adult.
It seemed to me that there was something unnaturally deliberate in the way my daughter uttered those words. Perhaps I imagined it, but then a father comes to notice any small inflections in his daughter's speech.
Every child born in the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is this new to him as it was to the first that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.
What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.
I don’t fret about posterity. But some things will last.
I confess I take a strange comfort from observing children inherit these resemblances from other members of the family, and it is my hope that my grandson will retain them into his adult years.
I don't mind _him_. It doesn't matter to me how _rude_ and _horrid_ and _gloomy_ he is, but what I can't bear are the faces of his wretched little children, those fabulously unhappy little children.
The kids are all we’ve got. They’re what we are.
Healthy children wil not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
You see a child play and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word.
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember, that virtue not hereditary.
When I became a father, I understood God. His presence is everywhere, since all created things come from him. That is how I am with my daughters. Only I love my daughters more than God loves the world.