"Our children await Christmas presents like politicians getting in election returns: there's the Uncle Fred precinct and the Aunt Ruth district still to come in"
"But there's no substitute for a full-time dad. Dads who are fully engaged with their kids overwhelmingly tend to produce children who believe in themselves and live full lives"
"For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison"
"With each piece I've completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It's like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can't do any better with the dances"
"What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children"
"You know, nothing is more important than education, because nowhere are our stakes higher; our future depends on the quality of education of our children today"
"Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive"
"I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?"
"I regret the whole worlds that will never come into existence, the children, the grandchildren, all the human possibilities that never were and never will be"
"Children had a special status - protected from the outside world - and they dressed for the part in a way that made that special status immediately visible to themselves and the adults"
