Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.
ALVIN TOFFLER, Future Shock
You know, once you give birth, once you have kids, you realize what's important in life, and you realize it's really not difficult to be a good person. And so when people aren't good around me, I tend to move away from that. There are so many good people in the world, and you want to surround your children with that.
Mother love is the most powerful, the most irrational force on earth, even more powerful than sexual love. However, one does lead to the other, so best not to spurn the former.
If you would have your son to walk honourably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.
ANNE BRONTE, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Not having children makes less work—but it makes a quiet house.
I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.
The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.
EVAN ESAR, The Comic Encyclopedia
Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put your kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.
GARRISON KEILLOR, Leaving Home
- Two people who know they do not understand each other,
- Breeding children whom they do not understand
- And who will never understand them.
T. S. ELIOT, The Cocktail Party
Parenting is the greatest of hum-a-few-bars-and-I'll-fake-it skills.
The hardest part about parenting is when I have to be The Dad--aka the Fun-Sucker--as opposed to being a friend.
JAMES PATTERSON, Family Circle, Jul. 2011
The duty of Parents to their Children does not terminate in giving them existence.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn't. But now, being a parent, I go home and see my son and I forget about any mistake I ever made or the reason I'm upset. I get home and my son is smiling or he comes running to me. It has just made me grow as an individual and grow as a man.
LEBRON JAMES, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Dec. 10, 2005
You know how parents rattle on to you about, "Oh, you won't believe your life will never be the same," and you think, Why can't these people just get over it? All they're doing is yakking about their kids. It's such a bore. And then you have kids and you just want to do the same thing.
UMA THURMAN, Good Housekeeping, Aug. 2010
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