Lucy Maud Montgomery Quotes

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Kids are ruthless.

Somehow it seems that all parents are certain that they themselves were victims of abuse in school and that they will not allow this to happen to their children. Even though children can also be the cruelest group imaginable - especially the cutest of them.

People were so cruel because of the way I existed.

The neighborhood children, of course, were forbidden by their parents to play with my little boy, Garth, so I finally got him a little kitten to play with. A couple of weeks later we found it on the porch with its neck wrung.

That cruelty which children are permitted to show to birds and other animals will most probably exert itself on their fellow creatures when at years of maturity.

Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selfish, lazy, flighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in expressing joy and sorrow, especially about trifles, they'll do anything to avoid pain but they enjoy inflicting it: little men already.

Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes.

When I was a child, fear was common to my life - fear of having nothing to eat, fear of the other children taunting me at school because I was illegitimate, and particularly fear of the big bombers appearing overhead and dropping their lethal bursts from the sky.

Children are so egocentric - they want to watch their lives, and not yours.

Small children and unruly people who are demanding attention.

A child of three cannot raise its chubby fist to its mouth to remove a piece of carpet which it is through eating, without being made the subject of a psychological seminar of child-welfare experts, and written up, along with five hundred other children of three who have put their hands to their mouths for the same reason.

You've got to keep the child alive; you can't create without it.

It is much easier to condemn a child than to understand a child.

That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.

I keep as far from children as possible. I don't like the size of them; the scale is all wrong. The head tends to be too big for the bodies and the hands and feet are a disaster and they keep falling into things, and the nakedness of their bad character.

Intolerance is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror, and heart and soul breaking of the world.

You can't punish a child who is acting out because of sensory overload.

Children are all more or less little monkeys in that they imitate everything they see. If their mother treats them exactly as she does her visitors they in turn play "visitor" to perfection. Nothing hurts the feelings of children more than not being allowed to behave like grown persons when they think they are able.

We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations.

If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.

Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.

My interests lie in nurturing children. That's part of the reason why the bullying thing has become an aspect of my life. I was bullied a lot growing up. I know firsthand the amount of life that is sucked out of you every time that happens, and how it affected me as a young adult.

The good enough parent, in addition to being convinced that whatever his child does, he does it because at that moment he is convinced this is the best he can do, will also ask himself: "What in the world would make me act as my child acts at this moment? And if I felt forced to act this way, what would make me feel better about it?