Kids quotes
12.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside kids — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I've always remembered this quote from a book that I read as a kid. It was something along the lines of "What's scary is not necessarily what goes bump in the night, but that which whispers at midday." And I've always held that. The day can just be as scary as night."
"As a kid, I think I wanted to be the on-set dresser for 'Charlie's Angels'. My goals weren't lofty. No. I just wanted to someday quit my paper round and that was about it."
"That was my earliest maladaptive coping mechanism I forged when I was a kid. I found that my fists weren't going to do any significant protective work for me, so my mouth was it. Making my father laugh was a way to control him."
"When I was younger, I was reticent to be vulnerable on camera and everything I was doing was just a really finely honed defense mechanism from when I was a kid, and I was now using this to make a living on camera."
"Progress! Progress through everybody dying and their kids eventually not caring who their parents hated!"
"Everyone has their parent's [music] collection which is strongly influences what you listen to as a kid. You have no choice. You have to listen to whatever they're bumpin. I grew up with what they listened to a lot."
"Obviously, it's designed by record company executives who want a cheap success, and they don't want to give money to anybody and they don't want to give contracts, so they've created this world of very bubbly teenagers who want to be "idols" and they think all they have to do is mime quite well and they've made it. ... But it's not the problem of the kids, it's the problem of the record companies, because it's just an inexpensive way for them to have so-called, I won't say "artists", but erm...You're nodding, you know what I mean."
"A lot of fairy tales are thinly disguised hostility raps against parents. Kids know that they can't make it on their own, that if they were left alone, they would die."
"We live in a society now where the sexual taboo for children has really passed by the wayside. Any nineyear-old can go into a 7-11 and check out the Playmate of the Month, but you don't want your kids to know about death. You don't want your kids to know about disfigurement. You don't want 'em to know about creepy things because it might warp their little minds."
"When I knew I was going to be able to write full time, I wondered, "What's going to happen to the relationships within my family?" Are they going to change? Is it going to be the kind of deal where you say, "I can't take this! Get me out of here! I can't stand these screaming kids!" The way it turned out was, I was able to change the diapers okay, after I stuck the pin through my fingers a few times. I had a dawning realization that children are not particularly hard to deal with."
"There is a relationship between humor and fear. Think of all the gags you ever heard that have to do with dismemberment, or something that's horrible in one way or another, even if it's just horrible in the sense that somebody's being embarrassed. What do kids laugh at? Kids laugh if your fly's down. That's hilarious. But for the kid whose fly is down, it's a horrible situation."
"I think most of us can remember from our own childhood, just in the Disney cartoons, things that frightened us profoundly. For me it was Bambi, the scene when the forest was on fire. That was something I had nightmares about. I can't imagine being a little kid of eight and seeing Night Of The Living Dead with living corpses eating the flesh of living people."
"When I gave up dope and alcohol, my immediate feeling was 'I've saved my life, but there'll be a price because I'll have nothing that buzzes me any more'. But I enjoyed my kids. My wife loved me and I loved her. And eventually the writing came back and I discovered that the writing was enough. Stupid thing is that probably it always had been."
"Often parents have a great desire and hopes, and aspirations for their kids but they don't have any practical plans of action."
"Look, I've had four kicks at the can. You've had a tremendous career. We're also happy. We've loved. We've lived. We don't starve. We haven't been shot in the gut. So at that point, I started getting a little more serious about the content we were making and the business and building the business. I also became more serious about life and being happy. I got married, I have kids - I'm happy at a cellular level now."
"I don't care if I die - look, I'm old - but you want your kids to have good times and a good life."
"I don't care if I die - look, I'm old - but you want your kids to have good times and a good life. I became sort of aware. I used to get so angry."
"I was getting mad at the system or the politicians or the government, and then I realized someone should talk about this stuff, and I have a big, multinational global-youth platform of kids who are going to change the world. So I was like, "I should be doing that. I should be showing this to people. That's my job." And since that time, I've been very happy."
"If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do."
"If you can embrace the idea that your success and happiness are tied up in defeating the fear that's holding you back, you're 90 percent of the way to where you need to go, because no, we're not kids, and no, this is not a bike."
