John Darnielle Quotes

Porter is my eldest child, and I tended to be fiercely protective when he was criticized. He actually was not a big complainer about school. Simply selective in what he chose to do and say.

No one expresses very great faith in the unselfishness of human being and everybody seems to acknowledge the fact that we must count on a certain amount of greed and willingness on the part of some human beings to prey upon others.

If anyone did any harm to my children, I don't know what I would do.

No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.

When anything is wrong with your child, your first instinct is to make it better.

I love my brothers' kids. It's funny - as an uncle, you become so protective of them.

There's something ancient and inevitable about this desire to do whatever you can to protect your child.

I'm fiercely protective of my children even though we are on TV.

Until you have a child, you won't really understand that you would actually throw yourself in front of a bus for your child. Like, you don't really get it. Like, it's like, 'Hell no.' You know, 'She's only two. I can make another one.' You know? But, you know, you have a baby, and then you actually care about this person.

My kids are my life and the thought of someone taking them away from me is my worst nightmare.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

I'm like all parents who try to shelter their children.

In the event of an oxygen shortage on airplanes, mothers of young children are always reminded to put on their own oxygen mask first, to better assist the children with theirs. The same tactic is necessary on terra firma. There's no way of sustaining our children if we don't first rescue ourselves. I don't call that selfish behavior. I call it love.

It needs some intelligence to be truly selfish. The unintelligent can only be self-righteous.

We're selfish to some degree, that's not a criticism and it doesn't mean that we are all narcissists. But in any situation our minds naturally evolve to what's in it for me? How does this affect me? Can this benefit me? Can this harm me? Then we might move on from that and have a more altruistic point of view about things but that's almost always our initial response.

I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

I do believe that there is something at the core of protecting your offspring - the love of a mother, you just don't get in the way of it.

Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.

All our acts, reasoned and unreasoned, are selfish

I enjoy the freedom of living alone and not having anyone interfere with my belongings. I mean, I'm quite a selfish human being. I think being in the public eye and growing up, it's made me quite selfish in some respects. I can be extremely generous with friends, but in relationships I can be quite mean in terms of my time and my affections. I take people for granted, and I'm trying not to do that.

Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked.

But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child