Quotes about children
children reading years
With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children. Neil Gaiman
children reading way
The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.
children adults use
Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.
children reading tired
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
children lying writing
We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
children people shooting
I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them.
children book not-happy
I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
children fighting winning
She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.
children believe world
Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
children book long
I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
children selfish rocks
I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.
children islands secret
I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children stories. They were better than than that. They just were. Adult stories never made sense, and they were slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?
children disappointment father
I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done; swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he wound up with.
children book reading
Reading is important. Books are important. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
children elements fairy-tale
It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these
children tiny adults
Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.
children real writing
I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.
children important fiction
Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.
children two numbers
A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain by Mr. Neil Gaiman, scrivener, and then doodled, elaborated upon, illustrated, and beaten soundly by Mr. Cris Grimly, etcher and illuminator, featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastiness, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged.
children writing men
We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, and children...Where nobody dies...In my worlds people died. And I thought I was being honest. I thought I was being honest.
children book adults
Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.
children space adults
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.
children optimistic america
China was the most optimistic place I'd ever been. Everybody I met was pretty much convinced that their children would have it better than their parents had had it. It was like being in America in the 1950's, with this deep optimism about the future because everything was getting better, and that fascinated me.
children character ideas
Picking one of your favorite creation or character is like picking the best one of your children! I'm not sure it really works. My very favorite characters tend to be ones I can go back to and look at, and have no idea how they popped out of my head.
children parent going-away
If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.
children bored simplicity
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.
children kids parent
I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.
children stories adults
I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.
children reading kids
Well meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading - do not discourage children from reading because you feel they're reading the wrong thing. There is no such thing as the wrong thing to be reading and no bad fiction for kids.
children parenting age
Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.
children names mountain
His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.
children clothes half
It has always been the perogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
children thinking media
Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?