Parenthood Quotes

It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.

~ Bill Bryson

As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.

~ John Updike

I watched 60 Minutes...and they showed this woman, she's in every kind of..thing like that. 'This woman', they say, 'she lost her first four children--died from malnutrition--and, now, she's afraid that her new six-month-old newborn twins will suffer the same fate'. ... Who's going to step in and say...'kick her in the cunt 'til it doesn't work', 'that woman is a sociopath! that is a sick human being!'. ... How much of a sociopath do you need to be? That is the slow ritual torture-murder of children, one after another! At what point does cause-and-effect not kick in? How many bulb-headed skeletons have to go stiff in your arms?! ... 'what? this one's not working... oh, well let's try again', one after another. At what point do you not go 'I think this is bad'? ... How many kids are you going to fuckin' kill, lady? ... If you impregnate someone under those conditions, they should abort the parents! that's sick!

~ Doug Stanhope

Blessing and obedience do comfortably and mysteriously coexist.

~ Jen Pollock Michel

Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not.

~ Andrew Pettegree

Someone suddenly had direct, unabashed access to my heart.

~ Beth Moore

Almightiness and wisdom combined will make no failures.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion.

~ Philip Zaleski

There is a wide distinction between confessing sin as a culprit, and confessing sin as a child. The Father's bosom is the place for penitent confessions.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It was too late for he and his father to have an adventure, and NOTHING seemed to have any color anymore.

~ Robert Kurson

God's Fatherly prerogative, is a kingly attribute so sweetly veiled in love, that the King's crown is forgotten in the King's face, and His sceptre becomes, not a rod of iron, but a silver sceptre of mercy—the sceptre indeed seems to be forgotten in the tender hand of Him who wields it.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Children are angels in exile, so close to God. They haven't had time to separate from Him.Ali

~ Davis Miller

One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults.

~ Sherry Turkle

When you take your place as the authority figure in your home, your child will feel more safe in the real world, not the screen world.

~ Gary Chapman

She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.

~ Richard Brookhiser

Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.

~ C.s. Lewis

it’s helpful to focus your child’s attention on the present moment by deciding together on one thing you may particularly look for.

~ Linda Lantieri

Your children are going through life with their eyes closed, so YOU'RE the one who has to steer.

~ Jennifer Senior

He was so much the humblest one that Wendy was especially gentle with him.

~ J.m. Barrie

He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.

~ David Halberstam

the sculpting of the brain’s circuitry during this period of brain growth depends to a great degree on what a child experiences day-to-day.

~ Lisa Lantieri

the real tests of life can come a child’s way at any moment

~ Lisa Lantieri

although the stress response was involuntary, the relaxation response required practice.[6]

~ Linda Lantieri

Kids don't always stop to judge or analyze a new experience unless the adults around them react strongly. Otherwise, they just take in the experience and move on to the next one.

~ Martin Sheen

The only way your child will grow out of their dependency into self-sufficient adults is for you to essentially abandon your own independence for 20 years or so.

~ Timothy J. Keller

I wanted to explain so much to him at that moment, but you can't give a six-year-old the perspective of a 40-year-old, not really, so I gave him the short course.

~ David Skinner

Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I'm betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.

~ Jessica Valenti

Mothers and fathers must be gentle at least some of the time. Mothers and fathers must also be strict at least some of the time. Most of the time, though, most mothers and fathers must be mostly strict and gentle together.

~ Connie Kerbs

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.

~ Beth Ann Fennelly

I didn't find out until I became a father. You don't just LOVE your children. You FALL in love with them.

~ Frasier Crane

That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don't know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it's just the horizon - and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it's suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you've had the right shots.

~ Emily Perkins

Disappointment is part of parenthood, Jasper. The trick is learnin' to love your kids even when they disappoint you.

~ Barry Lyga

Children see beauty in everything.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.

~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

It's quite sad that so many children go through life unsure whether their parents love them or not.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Know the rules of child rearing!!Rule one: Physical strength!Rule two: Physical strength!There are no rules three or four, but rule five is physical strength!

~ Kaoru Mori

I want to promise you / permanence, my constant orbit, but even continents / are revisions. I am only your diving bell in water / hemmed by shifting plates.

~ Robin Beth Schaer

An unemployed father is always considered more detrimental to the family than an unemployed mother, and at the same time, child psychologists kept coming up with new responsibilities for parents that seemed to fall to the mother alone.

~ Élisabeth Badinter