Terry Pratchett Quotes

It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs.

I like it when very little children think for themselves, because they do not have access to car keys or credit cards or crack pipes, but they have some really funny lines.

The real truth about children is they don't speak the language very well. They're physically uncoordinated. And they are ignorant of our elaborate ideas about right and wrong.

I really, really love children and I think probably among children is when I feel mostly berated. It's not like I feel like oh, there's some children here. I have to tone it down. I go nuts with children especially when I ain't got none. So when I'm round my mates' children, I jest them kids up first. I swear at them, I get more worked up, I say crazy stuff to them, fill their heads with nonsense and then I leave them.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

The first years of a child's life are too important for a child's future - their development, earnings, behavior, and health - for anyone to ignore.

children are not undeveloped versions of adult people: they are a different race of beings: they are children.

People have different personalities when they're drunk or take heroin, or whatever drugs.

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.

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.

Our children are weird. Nicely phrased.

Weird behavior is natural in smart children, just as curiosity is to a kitten.

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless at all.

Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal.

Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.

Lawless schools produce lawless children.

I feel that we can't educate children who are not healthy, and we can't keep them healthy if they're not educated. There has to be a marriage between health and education. You can't learn if your mind is full of unhealthy images from daily life and confusion about right and wrong.

I would probably creepily follow my kids around, see how they act, see what they talk about. I record my daughter just talking because the things she says are so funny. I could watch her talk all day.

Give an average baby a fair chance, and if it doesn't do something it oughtn't to a doctor should be called in at once.

Although a firm swat could bring a recalcitrant child swiftly into line, the changes were usually external, lasting only as long as the swatter remained in view....Permanent transformation had to be internal....The habits of self discipline, as laborious and frustrating as they were to achieve, offered the only real possibility of keeping children safe from their own excesses as well as the omnipresent dangers of society.

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.

I've noticed that the children of other nations always seem precocious. That's because the strange manners of their elders have caught our attention most and the children echo those manners enough to seem like their parents.

The child in us is always there, you know, and it's the best part of us, the winged part that travels farthest.

Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?

Children are what the mothers are.