Children

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, Bake me a cake as fast as you can; Pat it and prick it, and mark it with B, Put it in the oven for baby and me.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus.

 

Younger than she are happy mothers made.

 

The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination. J. R. R.

The kids, like all kids, loved the dog [Checkers], and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the slaves of their households. They no longer rise when an elder enters the room, they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up the dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize over their pedagogues.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself...

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children have taken off the shelf.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

A child shows gratitude the way a woman/Shows she likes a pretty dress—/Puts it on and takes it off again—

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

The first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attains years of discretion.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to theirParents, or the Country, and for Making ThemBeneficial to the Public.

Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

 

Et, Ô ces voix d’enfants chantants dans la coupole!

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.

All children, except one, grow up.

 

Every time a child says ‘I don’t believe in fairies’ there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

 

We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. “My God, my God—” I said to myself, “it’s the Children’s Crusade.”

A child is the root of the heart.

He knew only that the child was his warrant.

Blessings on thee, little man,

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls.