“Things have changed since we were children, perhaps not as much as we might have liked, but the world is a different place. Faster, louder, lonelier. Unlike the world around us, we haven't changed at all, not really. History is a mirror and we're all just older versions of ourselves; children disguised as adults.”
Source: Sometimes I Lie
“Remember that people who behave in hurtful ways have been programmed sometime in their childhood to be that way.”
Source: The Flower of Heaven: Opening the Divine Heart Through Conscious Friendship & Love Activism
“Campers screamed when they swam and played and sometimes simply for the sake of screaming.”
Source: The Box in the Woods
“There will be children here tomorrow,” Nate said. “Children. With their little child fingers.”
“Child fingers?”
“I’m saying we won’t be safe anymore. This other counselor better stop being sick really quick.”
Source: The Box in the Woods
“Parents who are emotionally unavailable, indifferent, uninterested, too busy and/or highly critical set their children up for self-rejection and the need for external validation.”
Source: The Flower of Heaven: Opening the Divine Heart Through Conscious Friendship & Love Activism
“People who learned Eric and I wanted to adopt a child often told us stories of adoptions gone wrong. The adopted child incapable of attachment. Who became a drug addict, a runaway, who drained bank accounts, ruined marriages. "I have a friend who adopted," these stories began. "It was a nightmare."...
And their stories did make me afraid, convinced me I was the vulnerable one whose life was at risk. Listening, I'd forget the abandoned, the neglected, the children curled on the floor of some empty-cabinet kitchen or crying in some school bathroom stall or shaking in some crib. I'd forget that these children belong to all of us. If they wield knives in the dark or hit heads against walls or refuse to speak, they signal our failure, not theirs.”
Source: Stranger Care
“You think you're better than us just because you're older than us? Because you're 'wiser' than us? All that means is that you're an insult to your old age, because nothing I've seen from you so far makes you seem very wise at all.”
Source: The Girl and the Ghost
“While there were still children in the universe, and while children could still be enchanted by something as simple and wonderful as a flower, there was still a reason to keep looking, a reason to keep believing.”
Source: Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds
“Children close their eyes to advice but open their eyes to example.”
“Yeah well what I wanted to say is that it's really the most basic duty for parents to feed their children...”
Source: Pretending Is Lying