Having Kids Quotes (page 15)
The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the...
Grace Paley
But I'm the only one in my class who has to stay after school."Yeah, well... that's okay. I had to stay after school when I was a kid, too." That seemed to get his attention. "You did?"Yeah. Only I didn't have to do it for only a couple of months, I had to do it for two years."Two years?"Miles nodded for emphasis. "Every day."Wow," he said, "you must really have been dumb if you had to stay for two years."That wasn't my point, but I guess if it makes you feel better, I'll take it."You're a...
Nicholas Sparks
On Final Twist, five college friends take a sixth to an expensive Italian restaurant, supposedly to introduce him to a hot girl, actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers.
George Saunders
Good God.” He felt like he’d just finished running the Boston Marathon.
How did she do it? How the hell did she do all that every day, and probably a lot more? But just
the dinner, the squabbles, the mess, the sheer volume of stuff that needed to be remembered, done,
handled with three kids. It was mentally and physically exhausting.
Fun, he admitted, but exhausting.
And she’d have to get up in the morning, get them up, dressed, fed. Then go to work. After
work, she’d replay—basically—what...
Nora Roberts
That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into thebargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It hadnever felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of strugglingto write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that hedidn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, hecouldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing itanymore.
Paul Auster
Here's what I think I'm having trouble with: this is what happiness is. When I was a kid, I thought I'd just get happier and happier as I got older, and have more things to be happy about. I based this theory on observation of select adults. The problem with my results is that I couldn't tell the difference then between happy and fake-happy. Now I know you pretend to be just frigging ecstatic over everything, maybe because you're so glad it's not worse.
Emma Bull
So, if I'm no cheerleader of sports, why write a chapter about it? Sports do have some positive impact on society. They solve problems, such as how to get inner-city kids to spend $175 on shoes. They serve as a backdrop for some of our most memorable commercials. And they remain the one and only relevant application of math. Not only that, but we have sports to thank for most of the last century's advances in manliness. The system starts in school, where gym class separates the men from the...
Stephen Colbert
They've discovered how to turn excess body fat into gold," he said, in a sudden blur of coherence."You're kidding."Oh yes," he said, "no," he corrected himself, "they have."He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely."Have you been to California?" he demanded. "Do you know the sort of stuff they do there?"Three members of his audience said they had and that he was talking nonsense."You haven't seen anything,"...
Douglas Adams
I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a...
Bell Hooks
You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore… All of the sudden, even though you have some place to put your shit, that idea of home is gone… Or maybe it's like this rite of passage… You will never have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start. It’s like a cycle or something. Maybe that’s all family really is: a group of people that miss the same...
Zach Braff
The officer grinned cheerfully at Ralph.
'We saw your smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?'
Ralph nodded.
The officer inspected the little scarecrow in front of him. The kid needed a bath, a haircut, a nose-wipe and a good deal of ointment.
'Nobody killed, I hope? Any dead bodies?'
'Only two. And they've gone.'
The officer leaned down and looked closely at Ralph.
'Two? Killed?'
Ralph nodded again. Behind him, the whole island was shuddering with flame. The officer knew,...
William Golding
It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that? bring them up? and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself? finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.
Erik Erikson