Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

You can't forbid children to do things that are available to them at every turn. God told Eve, 'Don't give the apple to Adam,' and look what happened. It's in our nature to want the things we see.

How strange it is that Socrates, after having made the children common, should hinder lovers from carnal intercourse only, but should permit love and familiarities between father and son or between brother and brother, than which nothing can be more unseemly, since even without them love of this sort is improper. How strange, too, to forbid intercourse for no other reason than the violence of the pleasure, as though the relationship of father and son or of brothers with one another made no difference.

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

The information was kept hidden for the same reason we keep matches from children. In the correct hands, fire can provide illumination... but in the wrong hands, fire can be highly destructive.

She must have really loved him to leave her home for the Seam. I try to remember that when all I can see is the woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones. I try to forgive her for my father's sake. But to be honest, I'm not the forgiving type.

Sensible fathers and mothers, when their children marry, go back to the old days and renew their youth.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

A child may have to be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt.

It is one of those lessons that every child should learn: Don't play with fire, sharp objects, or ancient artifacts.

I used to believe my father about everything but then I had children myself & now I see how much stuff you make up just to keep yourself from going crazy.

I have more pictures of my children than my father ever looked at me.

It's a dangerous fire begins in the bed-straw.

At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.

The same fire that cooks a meal for us may burn a child, and it is no fault of the fire if it does so; the difference lies in the way in which it is used.

Burnt child fire dredth.

How could you tell children they were playing with fire if they´d never had the experience of being burned?

The burnt child, urged by rankling ire, Can hardly wait to get back at the fire.

Big fires flare up in a wind, but little ones are blown out unless they are carried in under cover.

The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.

I was still afraid of him, I knew, but in a different way - I was no longer a child, afraid of the threat my terrifying father posed to my safety. I was a man, afraid of the threat he posed to my character, to my future, to my identity.

This is our punishment, our Tribulation. God has abandoned this world. The faithful have already gone on to their reward, and he has left the rest of us here, at the mercy of the demons and the devils. The sins of our fathers have passed to their children, and their children's children, and it will continue to be so until this world is completely destroyed. So it doesn't matter if you believe in God or not, because He is not here.

Motherhood is not what was left over after our Father blessed His sons with priesthood ordination. It was the most ennobling endowment He could give His daughters, a sacred trust that gave women an unparalleled role in helping His children keep their second estate. As President J. Reuben Clark Jr. declared, motherhood is ‘as divinely called, as eternally important in its place as the Priesthood itself.’

When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.

Let me tell you a secret about a father's love,/A secret that my daddy said was just between us.”/He said, “Daddies don't just love their children every now and then./It's a love without end, amen, it's a love without end, amen.

Is there anything else I can do to see to your comfort, Miss Trent?" Perriwick inquired. "She's fine," Blake growled. "Clearly, she--" "Perriwick, isn't the west wing on fire?" Perriwick blinked, sniffed the air, and stared at his employer in dismay. "I do not understand sir.