“Being bored and telling my mom I'm bored are two different things.
Telling my mom is a bad idea. She always finds something for me to do.”
Source: Blue Sparkles
“I have no children of my own, but I love a lot of kids and love a lot of people with kids, who, it seems to me, are in constant communion with terror, and that terror exists immediately beside . . . let’s here call it delight—different from pleasure, connected to joy, Zadie Smith’s joy, somehow—terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up.”
Source: The Book of Delights: Essays
“Sometimes we forget that parenting, like love, is a verb.”
Source: The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids
“I am not good, and I told you so. Somehow I cannot forgive her for her neglect of me as a child, when I would have clung to her. Besides, I hardly ever heard from her when I was at school. And I know she put a stop to my coming over to her wedding. I saw the letter she wrote to Madame Lefevre. A child should be brought up with its parents, if it is to think them infallible when it grows up.”
Source: Wives and Daughters
“Why did they make babies so damn small? And loud. Surely better arrangements could be made for the propagation of the human race.”
Source: Blue Smoke
“A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.”
Source: How We Fight For Our Lives
“Building confidence rather than self-esteem is like making a nice house with little foundation.”
Source: The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids
“Mother Earth is on her way to the gas chamber with all of her children.”
“Why we expect children to be more tranquil than a parliamentary body or a ministers' meeting I do not know and cannot imagine.”
Source: On the Training of Parents - Scholar's Choice Edition
“I write to teach myself, explore myself, inspire myself (in which I always fail), analyze myself, clear myself (in how much deep waters I can swim), and to self-expose myself before myself.”