Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you tell kids they're stupid--directly or indirectly--sooner or later they start to believe it.

If you tell children they are bad, that's what they believe they are and that's probably what they will become.

It's hard recommending books for kids, and a huge responsibility. If you get it wrong, they don't tell you they hate that particular book, they tell you they hate reading.

I never really thought I had an extensive vocabulary like that, and I'm not an avid reader. I didn't read a lot growing up - at all.

Even though I have this solid career in picture books, I've not only been thinking about kids - because I don't think that much about children; I'm not a child educator; I'm just a former child.

I would like teachers to look deep because sometimes kids do have a faade that they put up because they feel vulnerable. Their creative truth may not be ready for their friends to see.

I think so many people give us ideas of what we are. I think as women especially, because we're sensitive by nature, we're more vulnerable, we absorb other people's ideas about what we're supposed to think or who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to act.

When I look at young kids today I just don't believe it, parents take away the Gameboy and they're suicidal. They cannot take the pressure.

Little kids are that way; they feel if their parents aren't watching what they do then what they do isn't real.

I feel like we're so limited by the context at which we look at life. The way we look at who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to love... everything. I feel like that, in and of itself, is a project of a lifetime: the problem of how to break out of the limiting context that is imposed upon us by the educational system, by the church, by our parents... As a kid I rejected it without even thinking about it. Now that I'm a little older, I see how deeply destructive it really is.

This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.

Kids know nothing about racism. They're taught that by adults.

Women are sometimes drawn in to believe against probability by the unwillingness they have to doubt their own merit.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. A adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

People always tell me how lucky I am that my kids are adventurous eaters, but I don't believe that it's luck at all. By my involving them in the process, not only are they more likely to try something new, but also I can count on them to make better choices when I'm not around.

Kids are shy and they often don't want to make eye contact or say "thank you."

Always praise your kid even if he/she is unresponsive to learning. By insulting them and putting them down, you will only push them away and make them feel inadequate around other kids. Have faith that your child's brain is an evolving planet that rotates at its own speed. It will naturally be attracted to or repel certain subjects. Be patient. Just as there are ugly ducklings that turn into swans, there are rebellious kids that turn into serious innovators and hardcore intellectuals.

Your whole idea about yourself is borrowed-- borrowed from those who have no idea of who they are themselves.

Well meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading - do not discourage children from reading because you feel they're reading the wrong thing. There is no such thing as the wrong thing to be reading and no bad fiction for kids.

Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.

My theory of everything is that we are training kids to have gender bias against girls, therefore when you are an adult, you don't see it. We think it's normal.

The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors." "They call themselves ignorant and say the 'professor' is the one who has knowledge and to whom they should listen." "Almost never do they realize that they, too, 'know things' they have learned in their relations with the world.

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.

Some of these kids are spending more time with the coaches than they are with their parents. The coach is supposed to be raising these kids, not belittling them and talking to them like the world is coming to an end.