Best 405 quotes in «parenthood quotes» category

They don't know the distinction between taking care of a child and raising a child.

They might curse you, even despise you for doing so, but it took strong measures to ensure that a boy lived long enough to become a man.

They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days. She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish-–something they heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They had all their little treasures. . . And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and he believed it to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries––perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on.

Things always show up when they don't arrive.

Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.

Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason - for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons - sometimes out of a pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create an heir, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.

Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.

To have children is to plant roses, muguets, lavender, lilac, gardenia, stock, peonies, tuberose, hyacinth ...it is to achieve a whole sense,a grand sense one did not priorly know. It is to give one's garden another dimension. Perfume of life itself.

. . . to educate children is not merely to provide for their material, or even their intellectual life, but to assure them of the sympathy of their parents, to inspire them with confidence and the certainty that there is always one place where they can unburden their hearts and forget their pains and sorrows, trivial though these may ofttimes appear to us.

Thus bound together, they sheltered the child from the cold, dark night, enveloping him in warmth.

We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.

To receive children’s love and to come home to a child who runs to you with a hug, among the most powerful emotional experiences available.

True friends don't come with conditions.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

Too close supervision stifles the mental growth of children.

Travel is costly yes, but it pays dividends too.

Versteht sich, muß er sie bezahlen !" sagte er sich; aber er konnte schon wissen, daß er seinen Söhnen nie etwas zurückforderte und daß sie ihm nie etwas zu erstatten begehrten. Das ist Eltern gesund und läßt sie zu hohen Jahren kommen, auf daß sie erleben, wie ihre Kinder wiederum von den Enkeln lustig geschröpft werden, und so geht es von Vater auf Sohn und alle bleiben bestehen und haben guten Appetit.

Was she insane?! She would lose her head before she was 20!

We have a moral obligation to teach our children, what is right and what is wrong. So they can know, when they are right and when they are wrong.

We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child.

We have enough money. You don't want to be Uncle Daddy.

We’ve never been a close family, so I’ve never been able to see him as much more than an absent provider who’s going through the motions for the sake of his family.” “It’s not easy,” Jende said, shaking his head as he turned onto Elm Street, where the dentist’s office was located. “Who is it not easy for?” “For you, for your father, for every child, every parent, for everybody. It’s just not easy, this life here in this world.

We should teach our kids that they're blessing and not a burden and that they're valuable beyond what they can imagine - in God's eyes, in the world's eyes - that they're purpose is so important to fulfill and it's gonna make a difference in the world. And they're the only ones that can make the difference that they can make, in the way that they can make it. That's why we all have different fingerprints. And I feel like the message is not clear enough. It's not clear because they go to school and they get challenged and they're bombarded with the idea that abortion is okay, that we can just go ahead and, you know, if we're not ready to have a kid we can just take care of that problem. But kids are not a problem, they're not a mistake, they're not a burden. They're blessing from God and that's what we don't understand. My mom was sixteen when she had me and we both almost died, I was a second kid, she had my brother when she was fifteen. And we both almost died and the doctors told her to abort me and I think that a lot of people gave her that advice. So when I grew up I think I had a sense of being a burden. And I think a lot of kids actually have that sense.

We were immortal, did you know that? Did you feel it like me? We had the world at our feet and we were going to live forever. Then came life – growing inside you – and I became mortal.

We love our partners for who they are, not for who they are not.

We no longer get work out of our children; today we get meaning.

...we're not eighteen anymore. We've lived. We've created things that last – things of joy, and things of burden.

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

What could make a man stands taller than a newborn son?

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.

What is success, after all, but doing what you really want to do?

When a boy feels as if no one cares about him, or as if he will never amount to anything, he truly believes it doesn’t matter what he does.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

When a parent dies, for those left behind it can feel as though half the sky has fallen. My father was the sheltering sky, and beneath his mild firmament no storm ever raged, no hard rain fell.

When justice is more certain and more mild, is at the same time more efficacious.

When we take Iggy to the doctor together now, the nurse always says how happy it makes her to see a father helping out with a baby. 'I’m certainly doing their team a lot of favors', you mutter.

When we raise our children to Shine, the future becomes brighter!

When your children arrive, the best you can hope for is that they break open everything about you. Your mind floods with oxygen. Your heart becomes a room with wide-open windows. You laugh hard every day. You think about the future and read about global warming. You realize how nice it feels to care about someone else more than yourself. And gradually, through this heart-heavy openness and these fresh eyes, you start to see the world a little more. Maybe you start to care a teeny tiny bit more about what happens to everyone in it.

Where the parents are not 'good enough' the rest of the programme for life may be distorted and later stages in the archetypal sequence may fail to be realized. Thus, the boy whose father was inadequate or absent may fail to actualize his masculine potential sufficiently to establish the social or vocational role his talents equip him for, or he may be unable to sustain a relationship with a member of the opposite sex long enough for him to become an adequate husband or father himself.

Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.

Why did you do it? Give up everything to raise another man's son?' His father did look up at that. 'I didn't raise another man's son,' he said sharply. 'I raised my own.

...with kids, silence is never golden, only suspicious.

Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too? And could you in any way protect your son from Sansara? How could you? By means of teachings, prayer, admonition? My dear, have you entirely forgotten that story, that story containing so many lessons, that story about Siddhartha, a Brahman's son, which you once told me here on this very spot? Who has kept the Samana Siddhartha safe from Sansara, from sin, from greed, from foolishness? Were his father's religious devotion, his teachers warnings, his own knowledge, his own search able to keep him safe? Which father, which teacher had been able to protect him from living his life for himself, from soiling himself with life, from burdening himself with guilt, from drinking the bitter drink for himself, from finding his path for himself? Would you think, my dear, anybody might perhaps be spared from taking this path? That perhaps your little son would be spared, because you love him, because you would like to keep him from suffering and pain and disappointment? But even if you would die ten times for him, you would not be able to take the slightest part of his destiny upon yourself.

Yet despite the complexity of contemporary society, there are still some simple formulas we can use to distill the path to social and economic flourishing. One of these, labeled the “Success Sequence,” and credited to Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the left-of-center Brookings Institute, proposes a three-step rule book for modern American life: 1. Finish high school. 2. Get a job. (Any job. Because working leads to more working, which leads to better jobs.) 3. Get married before having children. When people follow this pattern—and crucially, in this order—life generally turns out pretty well.

You are almost never cool to your children.

You have ONE job as a parent. Raising a responsible human being. If you don't set high expectations for that human being - the world will have yet another crappy human being. Give them chores. Force them to do them

Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty

You're so haunted by other people's futures that you forget, the only future you cannot see is your own.

If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you're making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can't find a towel or a sponge or your "inside" voice.

When you push your stroller past a group of elderly women, you'll see in the turning gladness of their bodies a glimpse of the children they had been, turning toward the tin music of the ice cream van.