Children quotes
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"I always defended my father, as a child, and I think I'm still defending him - his policies at least. Oh, he wasn't at all a politician, in no sense of the word. He was sustained in his work only by a blind faith in India - he was preoccupied in such an obsessive way by the future of India. We understood each other."
"I always wanted to have children - if it had been up to me, I would have had eleven. It was my husband who wanted only two."
"Little by little I changed my mind, and when I was about eighteen, I began to consider the possibility of getting married. Not to have a husband, but to have children."
"I myself, in my heart, say that people should have all the children they want. But it's a mistaken idea, like many of our ideas that go back thousands of years, and it must be rooted out."
"Do you know that, until recently, poor people brought children into the world for the sole purpose of making use of them? But how can you change, by force or all of a sudden, an age-old habit? The only way is to plan births, by one means or another."
"I grew up like a boy, also because most of the children who came to our house were boys."
"When I'm not governing my country any more, I'll go back to taking care of children."
"Whether when I was a child and fought the British in the Monkey brigade, or when I was a girl and wanted to have children, or when I was a woman and devoted myself to my father, making my husband angry. Each time I stayed involved all the way in my decision, and took the consequences. Even if I was fighting for things that didn't concern India."
"In India's distant past, when the population was low, the blessing given a woman was, 'May you have many children.' Most of our epics and literature stress this wish, and the idea that a woman should have many children hasn't declined."
"Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world."
"What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet"
"When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville."
"Love is a naked child: do you think he has pockets for money?"
"Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race."
"There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about."
"David Sedaris wrote in one of his books that people like to make children into little grown-ups, which to him is about as funny as a dog in sunglasses."
"Children change a lot in terms of personality. Camaraderie that you feel with somebody might not be there a year later. That group might not have the same chemistry. So I completely understand why they're rushing into it, because they probably feel like they have to."
"There's a reason that girls cut off all their Barbie doll's hair and dye it and do things like that. I destroyed my Barbie dolls, and I know other girls did as well. And that's kind of the way they see kids movies and child actors in kids movies, as something that you've moved on from. It's babyish."
"People like to make children into little grown-ups."
"People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore."
