child's perspective Quotes

I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: Not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen.

As Anna Freud remarked, the toddler who wanders off into some other aisle, feels lost, and screams anxiously for his mother neversays "I got lost," but accusingly says "You lost me!" It is a rare mother who agrees that she lost him! she expects her child to stay with her; in her experience it is the child who has lost track of the mother, while in the child's experience it is the mother who has lost track of him. Each view is entirely correct from the perspective of the individual who holds it .

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

When my brother was a child, he kept telling my mom he wanted to be in the box. She didn't get it - he was two or three years old and kept saying he wanted to be in the box. She finally realized he was talking about the television.

God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

Palestine is only a stones throw away for a small Palestinian boy or girl.

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come, go, and do strange unfathomable thing in and around the child, the region's only enfranchised citizen.

Mummy, I woke today and there was a Lincoln Log in me sock drawer! ... That's the story of Jesus.

When I was very small, maybe 8 years old, we had a big radio that stood on four legs, and it had a cross piece underneath it, and I used to take a pillow and crawl under the radio.

If nothing has helped you decide, go ask a child. Children know what they need, and more surprisingly, the know what we need. Adults think. Kids respond with their feelings. They don't think about what you will think of their answer, so they just speak the truth-if you can get to them before junior high school age. At that time, they grow up, stop feeling loved, become depressed and start thinking-and what they are thinking about worries me.

I certainly don't think you need to be famous to want to leave a legacy, but when you are famous, it's even more likely that your child will get the wrong perspective on your life if you die prematurely.

One day, my daughter Tybee came to me, and she said, ‘I have so much love for you in my body, Daddy, I can’t stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that’s where love comes from.’

To a child, often the box a toy came in is more appealing than the toy itself.

Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.

I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat "I will not love you."

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

It has an L on it. L for love. See? It's the key to the universe, Dad. You said you were looking for it. You told Mom you were. I found it for you so you don't have to look anymore. So you can come home at night.

Your little child is the only true democrat.

James Wilkie is so conscious of the time we spend together. I try to be home to tuck him in at least four nights a week, and if I'm not, he's not letting me get away with anything. The other night I was sitting with him on the steps before Matthew and I went out to the theater, and he looked at me and said, 'Mama, this has got to stop. Go upstairs and take that dress off.'