“Women s magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife s involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband s claims on her. What a notion- a family that is threatened by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they were whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, then isolation.”
“Anyway, there is an essential difference in gender that isn t politically correct to mention these days. Women are the ones to bear the children after all. They are the ones to nurse. They are the ones, traditionally, who care for the infants. That takes a huge amount of time. He smiled, waiting for the applause, but something had gone wrong. There was a cold silence from the crowd... Did you just say that women aren t creative geniuses because they have babies? No, he said, No. Not because. I wouldn t say that. I love women, and not all women have babies. My wife, for one, at least not yet. But listen, we re all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we;re given a finite amount of life, and if a woman continues to spend hers creating actual life and not imaginary life, that s a glorious choice. When a woman has a baby, she s creating so much more than just a world on the page, she s creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. No matter what Shakespeare did, it s so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. Those babies were our ancestors, necessary to make everyone here today, and no one could seriously argue that any play is worth a single human wife. I mean the history of the stage supports me here. If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it s because they re making their creations internal, spending the energies on life itself. It s a kind of bodily genius. You can t tell me that isn t at least as worthy as genius of imagination. I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men, better in many ways. But the reason for the disparity in creation, is because women have turned their creative energies inward not outward.”
“The Lord made no better clock than a child, and none more bitter. Oh, what beautiful clocks they are.”
“Unsatisfied parents produce professionally successful but personally discontent children.”
“Det ved jeg, at til ægteskabet hører barnet også, og barnet skal I lade i fred. Hedvig får I værs go holde udenfor. Hende skal I fare varsomt med, siger jeg, for ellers kan I komme til at gøre en ulykke på hende.”
“Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you? Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing — what does that remind you of? Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results? Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world, and is based not on gain and fame, but on love.”
“A small child being dragged to bed peered curiously at me as it passed, then waved. We waved back, not being entirely sure how else to respond to small creatures like that.”
“It doesn t matter the materials but what you do and how you interact. Relationships are the most important in the art of teaching. A school can have the most beautiful stuff but it s the care and commitment of a teacher. What matters most is a true teacher with the real stuff inside and helping others discover that real stuff inside themselves.”
“Because they are ignorant and their parents are ignorant. Because they don’t know any better.”
“Poor little lambs,’ says one, eyeing us constantly, as if there is something wrong with us; as if we have a condition that can’t be named.” Pastel Orphans”
“Children observe everything with caution.”
“Do not scream, when a child breaks a glass, only touch the shoulder, and say gracious words; do not worry!”
“Real gases behaved like ideal gases as long as they remained in stable conditions. When the environment changed, either with increased temperature or mounting pressure, they began to deviate from their regular nature and at some point, crossed over to the less-than-ideal state. If deviating form perfection was the law of nature, why were children expected to be perfect in an imperfect world?”
“Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.”
“Gee, I wonder who you could be referring to? Owen said. I mean you, Erebus said. I just did not wish to be rude. All you ve been is rude. Owen muttered just under a whisper. Some minds are more capable than others. Erebus smiled at Hugh.”
“If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It s true; I ve met children who ve been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense – that they don t succumb to despair, that they don t demand a space for their pain – it s very true that children are resilient. But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wak of her mother s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.”
“Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.”