A Quote by Claire Messud

The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained.
My philosophy is that I am a friend of the children. I don't think anyone should see them as pitiable subjects or charity. That is old people's rhetoric. People often relate childish behaviour to stupidity or foolishness. This mindset needs to change. I want to level the playing field where I can learn from the children. Something I can learn from children is transparency. They are innocent, straightforward, and have no biases. I relate children to simplicity and I think that my friendship with children has a much deeper meaning than others.
It has been noticed that people who are not parents often have a peculiar fondness for children. This is sometimes attributed to a very beautiful nostalgia for a gift denied to them - dream-children, flowers that have only bloomed in imagination - but we think it is rather because they have not the faintest idea how dreadful children are.
I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.
Children are not our future, and I can prove it with my usual, flawless logic. Children can't be our future, because by the time the future arrives, they won't be children anymore, so blow me!
I think that children have a power to imagine that is almost magical when compared to the adult imagination, and this is something irrevocable that a child loses when he or she becomes bound by logic. We adults continue to have our children
I always love working with children. I never had children of my own. God has his purposes. God didn't let me have children so everybody's children could be mine. That's kind of how I'm looking at it.
I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.
I think that people think I'm crazy, like really mentally crazy. People think I'm uncouth and trashy, but I'm not. I don't think that I'm any of the stuff people say that I am and I know that I'm not. This whole mentally crazy thing, if I was mentally crazy I wouldn't be allowed to have all these children and take care of all these children without it being an issue.
Your kids are happy if you're happy. And if your love is happy, then everything works. I think a lot of people think once the children are there, it's all about the children. But you can't forget about your best friend, your lover, your husband.
Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their children's minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.
What I have most learned from my son is to respect him and to love him unconditionally. I believe that if parents respect their children and educate them with love and justice (and not just with words, but with their own behavior) the relationship with their children will be wonderful. Then parents will always be proud of their children, and children will always be proud of their parents. There will be peace in the family, and the home will be a sanctuary.
All logic texts are divided into two parts. In the first part, on deductible logic, the fallacies are explained; in the second part, on inductive logic, they are committed.
In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.
My vision for the future always centers around our children - it always centers around our children. So anytime anybody asks me what are the three most important issues facing the Congress, I always say the same thing: 'Our children, our children, our children.'
I know some children's writers write for specific children, or for the children they once were, but I never have. I just thought children might like my sort of visual humour.
Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.
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