The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.

Children notice things first, people later.

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

Children pick up words as pigeons peas And utter them again as God shall please.

Children are entitled to their otherness, as anyone is; and when we reach them, as we sometimes do, it is generally on a point of sheer delight, to us so astonishing, but to them so natural.

Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.

Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

Children, after being limbs of Satan in traditional theology and mystically illuminated angels in the minds of educational reformers, have reverted to being little devils-not theological demons inspired by the Evil One, but scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the Unconscious.

A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.