Peanut butter and jelly is like the older, more serious brother to egg salad sandwich. I’m an only child, so I eat both with incredible sadness.

Small children are capable of great love. Love that overwhelms. Love that changes small worlds completely. Dangerous feelings that blot out everything.

A ‘white’ kid that asks too many questions is called *curious.* A ‘black’ kid that asks too many questions is called *forward.*

An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows. All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

I wouldn’t want to work in a nursery, because I can’t deal with children. Or bees. Can I offer you some tea, or some biscuits and a diaper?

He said No to those Wild Things and so did I. Sometimes we said No and sometimes we shouted it and we were ferocious because it counted for everything.

A child has a greater chance of being sexually abused than burned in a fire. Along with stop, drop, and roll we must teach them to yell, run, and tell.

within the core of each of us is the child we once were. This child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are, and what we will be.

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.

I guess when you'd lived as long, and pondered as much, as Old Tom had...a game of hopscotch could be more profound than village politics or gossip.

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

[C]hildren were a much more difficult audience than adults because no on had yet had a chance to teach them that it was better to be polite than honest.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them upend them rearrange them and get her fingerprints all over them

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them upend them rearrange them and get her fingerprints all over them

Parents drinking is the reason you came into the world, and if we didn't keep doing it then, by God, it would be the reason you went back out of it.