No human quality belongs to only one class of person. We all get to be both aggressive and loving. We all get to delight in our careers and revel in our children. We're all kind and brave, soft and hard, sciency and artsy, interested in being looked at and in admiring others' physical form. Everything.
I distinctly remember being very young, sixth grade maybe, and being at a party and hearing the mothers discuss the children. And the mothers said, 'Well, it's very clear who's the leader in the group.' And they were talking about me!
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal.
It breaks my heart that my father never knew my children. He should have been around for another 25 years.
If you look at 'Gnomeo & Juliet,' the movie's message essentially says it doesn't matter if you're a 'red' or a 'blue': at the end of the day, parents should love their children and want what's best for them.
Oprah Winfrey's global influence is unparalleled. Not only has her generosity and firm belief that education is the key to a better life benefited countless women and children around the world, but her example has also inspired millions of people to give back in ways big and small.
It is ironic that it doesn't matter how successful I am in any other capacity: ultimately, my parents' marker is 'Do you have a wife?' and 'Do you have children?'
My mother's feeling about men in general were always a bit of a mystery to me. She had difficulties in Puerto Rico with the men in her life. Her brothers abused her. It's very easy to be judgmental, but more often than not, there are mitigating circumstances, and children are not usually aware of those.
If you have a class of 35 children, and they're all smiling, and there's one little bastard, and he's just staring at you as if to say 'Show me', then he's the one you think about going home on the train.
The things I wanted to do from a very early age - ie. get married and have children - precluded a lot of guys my own age from wanting to have anything to do with me.
I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.
It is our duty, to ourselves and to our children, to see the new world as it is now.
People still try to sell books that way - as 'books can take you to foreign lands.' We've given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.
In all honesty, I didn't love reading when I was a kid. I'd rather be running around in the woods or doing my best to scare the pants off all the children in the neighborhood by pretending my house was haunted or making them play Bloody Mary in the bathroom.
The Japanese have different words for love. To them, it's plain weird that we love spaghetti and love our children and love our lovers, all with the same word, when surely the thing being described as love is radically different in each case.
I never had a burning desire to have children. But then I met Nick, and I thought, 'This is the only person I'd do this with.' So we tried, but I was a little long in the tooth for that sort of thing. But we didn't turn it into a soap opera. We tried for about a year or so, and it didn't happen and took that to mean it wasn't meant to be.
I focus on supporting high quality early childhood health care and education. By betting my resources on very young children, I know I'm making an investment that pays guaranteed dividends with a high rate of return.
I think a beautiful quality that's a biological, hormonal imperative for women, whether they have children or not, is that we're built to be empathic. For me, it was finally being maternal in an appropriate way instead of trying to mommy ex-boyfriends.
Normally, adults process their waking experiences during sleep. Children cannot yet carry their waking experiences into sleep. Thus, in sleep, they settle into the general cosmic order without taking their physical experience into the cosmic order.
If we want to close the achievement gap, build a well-educated workforce and responsible citizenry, we must start with our youngest children.
My mother brought me numerous times to visit Orton as a child, and I have visited the gardens with my children many times. Orton is a gem on the Cape Fear River and I am excited about our restoration efforts to bring it back to its original landscape.
I think that anyone who denies their heritage doesn't deserve their destiny. My grandmother was a maid. She put nine children - eight of them - through college; I did not finish college.
Education is supposed to be our great equalizer, but when only half of low-income students are enrolling in college and only three tenths are graduating, you have to figure some of our children are getting a greater equalizer than others.
I believe that if we want our children to understand the world beyond their classroom, we must bring the world into their classroom.
I would like to use stories as a springboard for children to make their own creative responses. I would like to encourage them to express themselves using music, art, film or whatever, and upload it to a website having been inspired by particular stories.
Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry.
Children who have been in work for a long time suddenly get a thud down to earth once the cuteness fades, hips widen, voices drop and jawlines strengthen.
Interactions between fathers and children are the starting point of education.
If our children are becoming teenagers who are abusive, have mental health issues, and are committing heinous crime, it only means that we have failed them as a society. We have failed to give them a safe, nurturing environment to ensure that they are well-balanced, useful persons in the society.
We may look back in horror that we allowed our children to be born of the random processes that nature provides.
There's no greater cause in the world than finding cures for our sickest children. And no one does that better than St. Jude because its families never have to worry about paying the hospital for anything.
Pfft, I hate Christmas Day. It's for children and families. Not for people like me.
Often, women who lose babies are blamed for the loss of those children and are ostracised.
There were evictions that I saw that I know I'll never forget. In one case, the sheriff and the movers came up on a house full of children. The mom had passed away, and the children had just gone on living there. And the sheriff executed the eviction order - moved the kids' stuff out on the street on a cold, rainy day.
I've always wanted to be an actress. At school and in college, I did some things. But then I married, and then I had children, and then there were the political years.
