Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ben Marcus

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Ben Marcus

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

Barbara Jordan

We must have an economy that does not force the migrant worker's child to miss school in order to earn...just so the family can eat. That is the moral bankruptcy that trickle-down economics is all about.

Barbara Kingsolver

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

Barbara Kingsolver

Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.

Barbara Kingsolver

When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

Barbara Kingsolver

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

Barbara Kingsolver

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

Barbara Kingsolver

We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away.

Barbara Kingsolver

But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Barbara Kingsolver

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

Barbara Kingsolver

The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.

Barbara Kingsolver

Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people. ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.

Barbara Kingsolver

Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.

Barbara Kingsolver

I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.

Barbara Kingsolver

When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it time to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it. I do know that answer to that one: that's called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won't be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won't be up to her generation. It's up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project.

Barbara Kingsolver

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

Barbara Kingsolver

We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Barbara Kingsolver

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

Barbara Kingsolver

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.

Barbara Kingsolver

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

Bahman Ghobadi

I used to believe that people are only born once, but now I feel I have been reborn, like I was given a new life. I see myself as a child, full of energy and hope.

Bai Ling

I indulged the wild child inside of me - the one that's not aware of danger or fear - for the purity of existence for that character in that film. Of course, behind me they're saying, 'She's crazy!'

O ye children of men! The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men.

Asia Argento

Having been a child actor, I remember how directors would trick me to get good performances out of me. I don't think you need to do that.

We are targeting vulnerable elders with a weak social network, particularly those without children and living alone.

We're looking into her as a caregiver to her own children.

This program takes away teachers' creativity to respond to the different needs and talents of our children with one-size-fits-all testing in reading, math and science.

Tom Vilsack

This program is critical to the elderly, disabled and children of this state,

Andrea Yates

There are two tragedies, ... One is my children and the other is my wife.

Barbara Park

I find the term perfect child to be an oxymoron.

Barbara Park

There are those who believe that the value of a children's book can be measured only in terms of the moral lessons it tries to impose or the perfect role models it offers. Personally, I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. In fact, I happen to think that's huge.

Barbara Mertz

Since I am not as stupid as my children believe I am, I had immediately realized this might be a ruse, but I was not at all averse to a confrontation. In fact, I had been hoping for some such thing.