The Children's Story Quotes

#1. We are always getting to live, as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, but never living. Or as poor Frances learned in the children's story, it is always bread and jam tomorrow, never brad and jam today.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#2. There's a Buddhist story about the guy who wants to be enlightened, and then he gets a cow and a wife and a child, and all these things get in the way of his enlightenment. So, yeah, I have no chance of being enlightened.

Larkin Grimm

#3. I liked lots of 'Doctor Who' books, but my favourite tale was a spooky story about two invalid children - who've never met in the real world - who get trapped in a shared dreamscape when they fall asleep. It's called 'Marianne Dreams' by Catherine Storr.

Stephen Cole

#4. Oh, you mean fairy gossip, Eric," she giggled. "I get the picture," she said fluttering her lacy wings. "Don't look so sad, Eric. There isn't a day that passes when your nosy beak doesn't find its way into someone's business. I'm sure you'll find the best-ever story before

Caz Greenham

#5. Every man who has an idol or admires someone can recognise its themes. It's not only a film about the relationship between fans and idols, it's also a love story, a story of a man who is depressed, who has problems in his relationship with his teenage step-children.

Eric Cantona

#6. I guess you think you know this story. You don't. The real one's much gorier. The phony one, the one you know Was cooked up years and years ago And made to sound all soft and sappy Just to keep the children happy. -Ronald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes

Cameron Jace

#7. A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.

Patty Smith

#8. In today's newspaper there was a story about a married clergyman with three children who is calling for all sex to be declared un-Christian. He says lifelong virginity is the ideal for Christians. I wonder, has he told his wife and children this?

Wendy Buonaventura

#9. In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan Chang had done, telling me my mother's story. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth. After

Amy Tan

#10. In the rest of the story, Sleeping Beauty and the prince marry and have children. An ogress demands that the children and princess be cooked and served to her, though they are saved. Disney's animated films also left out that part, agreeing with Huguette's editing.

Bill Dedman

#11. With the adult ones, I feel I need to get as deep inside the psychology of a character as I can, and that needs to be first-person. In the children's books, I feel I need some distance. I don't want to be the nine-year-old at the center of the story. I need to have some type of narrative voice.

John Boyne

#12. Children delight in folk-tale and fairy lore, but the very little child loves best the story which mirrors the familiar. And it is for him, and for the mother who is striving in this age of profusion to guard the innate simplicity of her child's nature, that I have written my little stories.

Maud Lindsay

#13. Often, one discovery leads to interest in another. After the Dauphin's heart had undergone DNA testing and was placed in the crypt at St. Denis, I think people wanted some closure to the story about the fate of the royal couple's only child who survived the gruesome Temple Prison. I know I did.

Susan Nagel

#14. Parents of young children are always acting. You act excited to read a story for the five-hundredth time. You act impressed someone went to the bathroom on the toilet. The excitement I show to some of the children's scribbles should get me a Golden Globe nomination.

Jim Gaffigan

#15. I think I do pretty well with child characters. It's hard to write kids that are realistic, not annoying, and bring something to the story.

Elizabeth Hoyt

#16. The lyrics to the single 'Survivor' are Destiny's Child's story, because we've been through a lot, ... We went through our drama with the members ... Any complications we've had in our 10-year period of time have made us closer and tighter and better.

Beyonce Knowles

#17. The great thing about small children is they're portable, so we take them everywhere, but when it comes to 2015, Zachary's going to school, and I want to be there to drop him off and pick him up. I don't want to just be the father who reads them a bedtime story.

Elton John

#18. This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#19. Nothing on the face of this earth - and I do mean nothing - is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real...

Barry Hughart

#20. When you are falling short in vocabulary to explain the emotion in your story.Than you are writing the right story

Tushar Upreti

#21. It's no wonder we can't understand the grown-ups," said the Story Girl indignantly, "because we've never been grown-up ourselves. But THEY have been children, and I don't see why they can't understand us.

L.M. Montgomery

#22. Well I'm not a storyteller, as far as telling stories which relate to experiences in my own life. That's not what I do. I write songs which have a narrative and attempt to make sense and tell a story - sure! But whenever I hear the word "storyteller" I think of a children's musician.

Freedy Johnston

#23. Children seem to need, then, a delicate balance between the realistic and the fantastic in their art; enough of the realistic to know that the story matters, enough of the fantastic to make what matters wonderful

Eric S. Rabkin

#24. When you hide another story in a story, that's the story I am telling the children.

Maurice Sendak

#25. A fortress built long ago,
Walls made timeless by historic glory.
The small girl in the boat slows,
To listen to its story.

Rachel Lewis

#26. Fate is a story that's been written for you by somebody else. By your parent's genes, by what happened to you when you were a child, by your culture, by the fact that you were born a man or a woman. Destiny is a story that you write.

Alberto Villoldo

#27. Each child's story is worthy of telling. There shouldn't be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.

Anderson Cooper

#28. Kaz narrowed his eyes. I'm not some character out of a children's story who plays harmless pranks and steals from the rich to give to the poor.

Leigh Bardugo

#29. Ninety percent of the children's books patronize the child and say there's a difference between you and me, so you listen to this story. I, for some reason or another, don't do that. I treat the child as an equal.

Dr. Seuss

#30. I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

Grace Paley

#31. It is expected that a children's story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was.

Rachel Cusk

#32. There will always be road construction in life, and never a point when all the highways are fixed. Keep walking.

R.S. Vern

#33. Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

Malorie Blackman

#34. The orphan in children's literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?' - it is about finding your place in the world.

Brian Selznick

#35. In 'Hardflip,' you have a relationship where the father and son haven't seen each other in 18 years, but they find they're very alike: pigheaded, stubborn, passionate. It's a wonderful story of how you can't get away from how similar you and your children are.

John Schneider

#36. The justice of it seems to children correct and right - I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children's ability to know what is a story and what isn't.

Philip Pullman

#37. My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

Donald Miller

#38. The woman who entered had the plump, matronly figure of the Good Gramma in a children's story and the beady eyes of a dick in a department store.

Stephen King

#39. Children will go with any story as long as it's good, but white adults sometimes think that if a black child's on the cover, it is perhaps not for them.

Malorie Blackman

#40. If you read 'Lord of the Rings' and dismiss it as a lie because it has orcs and elves, you're missing the whole point of the story. If children don't have to be concerned about strangers because there's no such thing as a Big Bad Wolf dressed like Granny, you're missing the point.

Doug TenNapel

#41. Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There's no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.

Jeanette Winterson

#42. My children's books are written on the belief that every child has a talent and a passion. Each story unfolds into an adventure of nurturing that confidence until a passion blooms.

Masiela Lusha

#43. Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity (RDMCC) is a registered charity no. 1137409. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre (RDMSC) is a registered charity no. 1085853. The Roald Dahl Charitable

Roald Dahl

#44. If you take the time to listen to an upset child's story with empathy, and guide the child toward figuring out the root of the problem, then the result is often that the child not only calms down, but also in the future is less likely to get so upset.

Carolyn Hax

#45. You have given us a part in a story the bards will sing to our children's children.

Jacqueline Carey

#46. Oh, Mama," I said. "What if I don't live that long?" My mother didn't hesitate one second. "By hook or by crook, you will. Having children only increases your grip on the world. It's like reading a thriller. You can't put it down because you have to know how the story turns out.

Jo-Ann Mapson

#47. Candid and searing, Deborah Jiang Stein's memoir is a remarkable story about identity, lost and found, and about the author's journey to reclaim - and celebrate - that most primal of relationships, the one between mother and child. I dare you to read this book without crying.

Mira Bartok

#48. Why does everything want to eat children?!"
Neferre smiled. "Because you taste like candy. Stinky socks would mask your delicious scent from the aziza. We must get you stinky socks. So they do not eat you."
"That's not much of a bedtime story! You really haven't done this before!

Ash Gray

#49. 'Anna Karenina' is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. It's gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, it's the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.

Hanif Kureishi

#50. Sometimes I regret that the wonderful children's stories that have been made into movies were - people no longer read 'The Wizard of Oz'; they think they know the story. They don't know anything about all the bits and pieces they had to leave out.

Robin Hobb

#51. I have written a few children's books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called 'The Package', and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.

Laurie Anderson

#52. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.

Celine Kiernan

#53. When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good ... nothing is too difficult for children.

Madeleine L'Engle

#54. I think I have become a better writer since having children. It improves creativity, particularly because once you have children it makes you realise the story isn't about you.

Louise Doughty

#55. A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

C.S. Lewis

#56. I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel.

Geraldine McCaughrean

#57. My dad came over to the house ... went into his pocket and pulled out a handful of money, and began to pass it out to the children ... This was the same man who, when I was his child, I would ask him for 50 cents, this man would tell me his life's story.

Bill Cosby

#58. I made a terrible mistake. I got caught up in the excitement of the moment. I would never intentionally endanger the lives of my children. I love my children. I was holding my son tight. Why would I throw a baby off the balcony? That's the dumbest, stupidest story I ever heard.

Michael Jackson

#59. The most important thing of all is my parents were able to leave all four of their children better off than themselves. That story has a name, it's called the American dream.

Marco Rubio

#60. More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderly toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.

David Blankenhorn

#61. They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.

Nick Hornby

#62. Book is the best friend, have no demand, no complain

Avi Salmon

#63. My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ.

Sinead O'Connor

#64. If I rescued a child from drowning, the press would no doubt headline the story: 'Benn grabs child

Tony Benn

#65. The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

Rebecca West

#66. Demond's family history wasn't so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?

Jesmyn Ward

#67. if you want to convince children of the power of books, don't tell them stories are good. Tell them a good story.

Roger Sutton

#68. And now dear little children, who may this story read,
To idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne'er give heed:
Unto an evil counsellor, close heart and ear and eye,
And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly.

Mary Howitt

#69. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.

Fanny Howe

#70. To me the early childhood story is an ecumenical one. You take poverty seriously. You take seriously maternal depression. You take seriously children under stress and you take seriously the effects of extended hours participation in poor quality care. Those are the facts I begin with.

Robert Manne

#71. The Song is a gritty, realistic, and powerful film. The acting and production quality are excellent, and the story is captivating. Although not for children, the story is a good reminder to adults of what really matters!

Alex Kendrick

#72. Be the hero of your children's story. Never let them believe for a minute that honor, courage and doing what is right is only reserved for other fathers and mothers.

Shannon L. Alder

#73. When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.

Bruce Feiler

#74. When you tell the children tales of the Baba Yaga on a cold winter's night, you might remember to mention that whether or not the witch is wicked often depends on who is telling the story.

Deborah Blake

#75. The ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#76. I think you've all heard my story about my daughter and how we felt Children's Hospital saved her life when she was less than a year old. I won't go through all of the details of that.

Jack Nicklaus

#77. I have a great relationship with animals, and with children. I get to their level. I try to see the way a child looks at the world, it's hugely different.

Story Musgrave

#78. You welcome your children into the world knowing that if all goes the way you plan, you won't get to see the end of their story. It seems a sad notion until you realize that's what gives you hope for the future.

David Mack

#79. I enjoy writing for both kids and adults, though I think I'm better at children's stories because I was a teacher for so long, and I know that audience well. The process is no different whether I'm writing for children or adults. Really, the elements of making a good story are the same.

Rick Riordan

#80. Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.

Chinua Achebe

#81. I cry all the time. It's more like when didn't you cry. My friends are like, 'Oh God, she's sobbing again.' I cry if I'm happy, sad, normal ... What really gets me is when I read a sad story about a child in the paper, especially at the moment with my hormones raging.

Sara Cox

#82. Above all, joy should come from the true story of the joyful God bringing salvation to sinners so they could become His children.

Warren W. Wiersbe

#83. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.

Philip Pullman

#84. You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.

Billy Bob Thornton

#85. If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.

Dorothy Allison

#86. I think that every show on television has its place. I think Married With Children or, I don't know, The Nanny ... some people want to go home, turn on the TV and be able to iron their clothes or grab a sandwich. Come out and catch a joke and not have to follow the story.

Peter Krause

#87. But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.

J.P. Delaney

#88. There are lives I can imagine without children but none of them have the same laughter & noise.

Brian Andreas

#89. The true marriage movie involving in-laws and children is a story about how marriage is directly affected by external characters who impact the central relationship in various ways.

Jeanine Basinger

#90. I do not really write for children: I write only for me and for the few people I hope to please, and I write for the story.

Sonya Hartnett

#91. At times the engine stopped, and grown-ups and children climbed out of the carriages with tins to collect water from the engine steam pipes. This was the only drinking water that we had access to, and though it was hot and very rusty, it was the best drink I felt I'd ever had.

Alfred Nestor

#92. They were really children that morning. By nightfall none of them were.

First line from Patrick's short story - The Quarry-gang Kids.

Patrick McCusker

#93. The illustrations in the book are beautiful. The story is a great
page-turner and is very clear and easy to read. The children really enjoy answering the questions."-Kay Harling (Director Emerald Preschool & Community Kindergarten, B.Ed Early Childhood.)

Allison Jenkinson

#94. Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow. In a story, a baby comes along to fill the child hollow. But in life, the hollows continue empty.

Franny Billingsley

#95. Basically the children who watch it just see the little characters they love, and so they're not discerning about whether it looks great or it's a great story or anything.

Don Bluth

#96. It's not enough to wish, dream, hope. Even children know this. We must set sail into the sea of uncertainty. We must meet fear face-to-face. We must take our dreams as maps for a greater journey. Dreams, to come true, need a good story. So go live one.

Vironika Tugaleva

#97. And that is the story of the boy who cried "Dragon!"
Of course, when dragons sit around the campire at night or tuck their children into bed, they tell the story of the dragon who cried "Boy!

Mike Resnick

#98. I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly.

Elliot Perlman

#99. I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.

Michael Cunningham

#100. My story is the story of thousands of children from around the world. I hope it inspires others to stand up for their rights.

Malala Yousafzai