WHAT CHILDREN SENSE

'Unconsciously, everyone under the age of ten knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocriosy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty.'

Mavis Gallant, 'The Doctor' in The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories, p.173.

THE POWER OF PLACE

'Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.21.

MISCARRIAGES MATTER

'It is not ordinary to conceive a life and then lose it; it's very far from ordinary. These passings should be marked, should be respected, should be given their due. It's a life, however small, however germinal. It's a collection of cells, from you, and in most cases, from someone you love. Yes, of course, worse things happen every day; no one in their right mind would doubt that. But to dismiss a miscarriage as nothing, as something you need to take on the chin and carry on, is to do a disservice to ourselves, to our living children, to those nascent beings that lived only within us, to the person we imagined throughout the short pregnancy, to those ghost children we still carry in our minds, the ones who didn't make it.'

Maggie O'Farrell, I am, I am, I am, p.104.

THE LIMITS TO CHILDREN'S KNOWLEDGE

'Children know much more than their elders imagine, but as they misinterpret it, they often know less.' 

Martin Boyd, A Difficult Young Man, p.59. 

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?

'We usually ask little kids, What do you want to be when you grow up? I wonder if we're setting them up for failure with that question. Maybe a better question is, Who are you? What do you think God made you to do when you grow up?' 

John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest and the Art of Being Human, p.73. 

THE PURPOSE OF MARRIAGE

'In the wake of the affair, Rabih, adopts a different view of the purpose of marriage. As a younger man he thought of it as a consecration of a special set of feelings: tenderness, desire, enthusiasm, longing. However, he now understands that it is also, and just as importantly, an institution, one which is meant to stand fast from year to year without reference to every passing change in the emotions of its participants. It has its justification in more stable and enduring phenomena than feelings: in an original act of commitment impervious to later revisions and, more notably, in children, a class of beings constitutionally uninterested in the daily satisfactions of those who created them.' 

Alain de Botton, The Course of Love, p.182. 

A DECENT EDUCATION

'...for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it's nearly always done by women.' 

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.115. 

CHILD-LIKE FAITH

'...within the child-self that is part of us all, there is perhaps nothing more precious than the fathomless capacity to trust.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'All's Lost - All's Found' in A Room Called Remember, p.190. 

OUR LAST BINDING COMMITMENT?

'Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.' 

Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting, p.44. 

THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE YOUNG & OLD

'Sometimes very young children can look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It's because neither are humans to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.' 

Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel, p.4.

SELF-ESTEEM

'When in comes to the gaining of genuine confidence and genuine self-respect, even the supposed default humans needs a surprising amount of encouragement. What they need, life everyone else, is a) one thing to be good at, and b) one person to notice.

With me that starts at school.

It starts with Mrs Slater.' 

Robert Webb, How Not to be a Boy, p.113. 

PARENTAL EXPECTATIONS

'Parents' imaginations build frameworks out of their hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged.'

Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, p.53.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PARENTS

'At some level every kid knows that his parents' wellbeing is paramount to his own safety, even his sense of self.' 

Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain, p.43. 

THE EMOTIONAL LITERACY OF CHILDREN

'How quick children are to absorb the unexpressed anxieties of their parents; how fluent they become in the unconscious art of compensation, and how instinctive is their assumption of responsibility.' 

Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain: Notes from an Australian Life, p.40. 

GETTING TO KNOW THE NEIGHBOURS

'There is no more intimate way of getting to know your neighbours than teaching their children.' 

Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, p.4.

A BROAD EDUCATION

'The soul of a child, as it reaches out towards understanding, has need of the treasure accumulated by the human species throughout the centuries. We do injury to a child if we bring it up in narrow Christianity which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of the purest gold to be found in non-Christian civilizations. Lay education does an even greater injury to children. It covers up these treasures, and those of Christianity as well.' 

Simone Weill, The Need for Roots, p.87. 

LOVING KINDNESS

'They offer me a space on the sofa next to them
and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like
appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself
because they are so kind and keep regenerating and
recharging their kindness without any input from me.'
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, p.46.  

CHILDHOOD

'At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done.'

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, p.76.

PARENTING

'Odd how the needs of children seem so often to coincide exactly with the opinions of their parents.' 

Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy, p.73. 

HUMILITY

'...we are as little children. Some know it and some don't.'
Wendell Berry, 'Pray Without Ceasing' in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, p.44.