Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and touching thing.
Your children are the greatest gift God will give to you, and their souls the heaviest responsibility He will place in your hands. Take time with them, teach them to have faith in God. Be a person in whom they can have faith. When you are old, nothing else you've done will have mattered as much.
Do you remember these words: ‘What Lamp has Destiny to guide Her little Children stumbling in the Dark? “A Blind Understanding,” Heaven replied. ‘Geoffrey has that—a blind understanding. All children possess it. It is only as we grow older that we lose it, that we cast it away from us. Sometimes, when we are quite old, a faint gleam comes back to us, but the Lamp burns brightest in childhood.
You may be outnumbered by your problems and facing hopeless circumstances, but God has a divine plan to bring you into restoration - and you don’t have to suffer any casualties.
If you and your family are not where you think you should be, you need to be open for God’s Spirit to point out the things that may be hindering your ability to advance.
On every trip back to the Midwest, I step aside from my schedule and visit my parent’s graves. And with trimmers in hand I kneel down and I cut back the intruding grasses and occasional weed that has edged up against their headstones. It is not in grief that I do this, but in the fondest recollection. The tears that often visit me there are those of joy; that God had thought enough of me to bless me with parent’s rich in love, ever bound by sacrifice, and sturdy in faith despite the nature of the adversities that so often beset them. And as I leave their graves and head back to the pressing demands of my world, I depart with the commitment to live my life in a manner that my children will find no grief at my grave, but joy in knowing that God chose me for them.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
I sell my children, and though they feed me, they don't love me as hers do.
Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.
A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.
He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
A child’s imaginary playmate just might actually be there.
The only difference between a grown-up's mistake and a child's is the size of the consequence.
We as authors sign a pact with our readers; they'll go on reading because they trust us to play fair with them and deliver what we've promised.
The tears are falling freely now, and I don't care if he sees them. They're tears of relief for my nephew, worry for my grandfather and my brother, and shame for my mistake. I figure I earned them.
Children are not children. They are just younger people. We have the same soul at sixty that we had at forty, and the same soul at twenty-five that we had when we were five. If anything, children are wiser. They know more than we do, and have at least as much to teach us as we have to teach them. How dare we try to fit them into our boxes and make them play by our rules, which are so very, very stupid? How dare we tell them anything when we live in a world so obviously backward? And how ungrateful and irreverent we are to listen so little and watch so casually when angels themselves have moved into the house.
Generally she kept her head down, but on the occasions she raised it she was treated to the most intimate of panoramic views: the scattered possessions of the three people she had created. Several small items made her cry: a tiny woollen bootie, a broken orthodontic retainer, a woggle from a cub-scout tie. She had not become Malcolm X's private secretary. She never did direct a movie or run for the Senate. She could not fly a plane. But here was all this.
Free play teaches children to be less anxious. It teaches them resilience.
Children who need the most love — will show it in the most unloving of ways.