Childhood Honesty Quotes

I wouldn't have a face like that,' proceeded the child, with a good deal of earnestness, 'not if you gave me a million dollars.' He thought for a moment, then corrected himself. 'Two million dollars!' he added.

We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.

Children can ask what adults don't dare to because we don't want to admit we're scared and we don't really want to hear the answers.

There's an old actor's saying about how you don't work with children or animals. I disagree with both of them. Some of the best times I've ever had were working with kids because there's an honesty to them.

They [the Hardscrabbles]never enjoyed it when adults playfully lied to them. The adults always think they're being amusing and imaginative, just like children. But kids never lie playfully. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.

I'd like to study the drawings of kids. That's where the truth is, without a doubt.

Kids have a weird honesty, especially in their reaction to things where a lot of older people who have matured have lost that.

We never hid anything from the kids. I feel whole again, I really do. I've told them, 'Mommy's boo-boo is much better now.'

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.

Children are brutal and have no malice, which makes everything they say horribly cutting.

Telling kids the truth isn't always entirely possible, but talking to them is.

Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

Children know when they are being sold a sanitised version of the world, and I think that's a betrayal of the relationship between author and reader.

Your kids can say some cruel things to you at times. For example, Nicole, Miles and Sofie are standing there in the room and I'm dressed to kill in my own mind. They'll say to me, 'Dad, you're not going out there looking like that are you?' If that doesn't kill a star, I don't know what does!

Adults lie to themselves all the time about what is acceptable, but kids know what is right and wrong.

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

That was other thing i hated about kids; they always said th exact things that deep dpwn you already knew, would never admit, and most certainly never wanted to hear.

Maurice Sendak never - I remember he said something that was very striking because it's something I never thought about. I always loved his work, and he said, 'I don't really view myself as a children's book author. I just try and write about childhood as honestly as I can.'

As children's inquiries are not to be slighted, so also great care is to be taken, that they never receive deceitful and illuding answers. They easily perceive when they are slighted or deceived, and quickly learn the trick of neglect, dissimulation, and falsehood, which they observe others to make use of. We are not to intrench upon truth in any conversation, but least of all with children; since, if we play false with them, we not only deceive their expectation, and hinder their knowledge, but corrupt their innocence, and teach them the worst of vices.

Most children - I know I did when I was a kid - fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that - you don't want to tell Mom and Dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child, I think. I was a liar.