A Quote by Elizabeth Swados

The world is an orphanage for grownups — © Elizabeth Swados
The world is an orphanage for grownups
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
As a kid, I really did want to hang out with the grownups, so it was hanging out with the hippest grownups in the world. This was the nicest bunch of people I've worked with in show business, with the exception of the people around 'A Mighty Wind.' It really was a wonderful eight years.
To see change in your own area code is very powerful. There's a little orphanage down the street from my company, and we donate $1 from the sale of each CD we sell to the orphanage.
I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor.
When I was little I knew my father had been an orphan and had lived in an orphanage. I was curious, but my father wouldn't satisfy my curiosity. He told only one story about the orphanage, and that was of sneaking out and buying candy, which he sold to other orphans. He said he had a pretty good business going - till he was busted! I guess he told that anecdote because he was the hero of it and I suspect he was rarely the hero as a child, more often the victim. There's a photo of the actual orphanage on my website, and you can see it's a forbidding looking place.
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never became what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never became them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we will miss them always.
I think that it is expansive for the mind, for the fantasy of children and grownups alike, to understand that the world is huge. There is so much in the world to experience, and the odds are so essential to life.
[ Adult novels] was the world of grownups. There was nothing about teenagers.
With all the chaos, pain and suffering in the world, the fact that my adoption of a child from who was living in an orphanage, you know, was the number one story for a week in the world. To me, that says more about our inability to focus on the real problems.
What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.
I had problems getting my words out. If people spoke directly to me, I understood what they said. But when the grownups got to yakking really fast by themselves, it just sounded like 'oi oi.' I thought grownups had a separate language. I've now figured out I was not hearing the hard consonant sounds.
I went to a number of foreign countries, and during whenever I went, I would try to go to an orphanage or a home for children. And I was seeing thousands of kids around the world that needed homes.
I don't really think differently of making a movie for grownups or making a movie for kids, if it's boring it's boring, so you want it to be entertaining and I think funny is funny whether it's for kids or grownups, the only real difference is language.
I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, that's completely inconsistent with the world we observe, that's fine. But don't make your kids do it. Because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need engineers that can build stuff and solve problems.
Since I was sent to an orphanage, and I saw very little of my mother, I can counsel mothers that you shouldn't abandon your children. Before you bring a child into the world, think deeply about things, so that they lack absolutely nothing, least of all love.
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