Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw.
The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn’t be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike.
I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn’t feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror’s reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus.
These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall.
The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. ‘Who are you?â€� I’d ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn’t me. I’d watch my lips moving and say it again, ‘Who are you?”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“Ty grabbed my phone and threatened to tell Otter that I liked being spanked during sex.

This proceeded to lead up on a long tangent where I had to have him explain to me how he knows about stuff like people getting spanked during sex. He said he might have heard it mentioned while watching MSNBC. I told him he was grounded from watching the news channels for a week. That's where this whole sidebar should have ended, but then I was forced to explain S & M and bondage to my little brother, who was persistent on the topic, and who kept staring at me with mounting horror when I finally /did/ explain, and I realized I had maybe gone too far, and we had to spend the next five minutes swearing to God that I had never nor would I ever attempt to do anything like that. He might now be the only nine-year-old who has heard the terms "cock ring" and "fisting". My parenting skills are unparalleled.”
― T.J. Klune, Bear, Otter, and the Kid

“Even before i had children, I knew that being a parent was going to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn't really know.
I didn't know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope.
I didn't understand that sometimes when your kids scream so loudly that the neighbors are ready to call the Department of Child Services, it's because you've served the wrong shape of pasta for dinner.
I didn't realize that those deep-breathing exercises mothers are taught in natural-childbirth class dont really start to pay off until long after the child is out.
I couldn't have predicted how relieved I'd be to learn that other peoples children struggle with the same issues, and act in some of the same ways, mine do. (Even more liberating is the recognition that other parents, too, have dark moments when they catch themselves not liking their own child, or wondering whether it's all worth it, or entertaining various other unspeakable thoughts).
The bottom line is that raising kids is not for whimps.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“What is it?â€�
“A prayer.�
“For a child?�
She nodded.
“For me?�
Another nod.
“On a tree?�
“Trees spend all day looking up at God.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach...”
― Anne Rice, Merrick

“All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.

And now, in this darkness, I fear nothing. If you were to leave me here, I would feel nothing. I would walk as I am walking now. As a man, you can't know what I mean by what I say.You can't know a woman's vulnerability. You can't know the sense of power that belongs to me now.”
― Anne Rice, Merrick

“It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.
No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Most parents are not really ‘supportiveâ€� because they want their kid(s) to succeed; they ‘supportâ€� their kid(s) as an attempt to avoid appearing to have bred a failure, or, failures â€� in the eyes of their peers and/or neighbours.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Whether I felt strong and courageous or not, I would now have to be for my baby boy.”
― Abeba Habtu, Become Courageous Abeba: A Story of Love, Loss, War and Hope

“Trying to rewrite the past was a child's game, a pointless, ridiculous child's game no one ever won.”
― Sabrina Jeffries, A Dangerous Love

“And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l never sing, but this stuff was just atrocious. For example:

I love you
You love me
Thank God for that
I'm so happy

And Ty's personal favorite (which he helped me on):

Otter! Otter! Otter!
Don't lead cows to slaughter
I love you and I know
I should've told you soon-a
But you didn't buy the dolphin-safe tuna!

TY asked me if I got the hidden message in his poem. I told him it was loud and clear.”
― T.J. Klune, Bear, Otter, and the Kid

“Dating a wo/man with a child is adoption â€� without the paperwork.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.”
― Charles Dickens

“In my dreams," said Ender, "I'm never sure whether I'm really me.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“When you see a child starving and you think government failed. But I think God failed , could not even fill the hunger of a child.”
― John Art

“Just a child. All this time we've feared you, sought you. And you're nothing more than a human child.”
― Joshua Winning, Sentinel

“Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his independence. WAtching a personality unfold is perhaps the deepest pleasure of parenthood; wishing, or trying, to retard this growth is one of the deepest sins.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“No child’s face is dirty even if it is muddy, because an innocent face has so much light that anything comes onto it becomes almost invisible!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“But what was I but a scared child lost in a strange world? How could I replace all that been lost? Where was my place in the world?”
― Patrick Carman, Stargazer

“You can’t play with everything that looks playable, I guess even a child knows that.”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“When coming to making kids: Size doesn’t count, it’s sperm count that counts.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The greatest legacy a father can leave for his children before he departs is PEACE, otherwise his properties will go in PIECES sooner that he dies.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“If you have taught your child how to walk when he is all alone, it means that you have taught him everything!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Being a 'good' parent is more about the parent, and, less about the 'supposedly-could-have-been-bad' child.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“There she stood, hiding; the mother without child, the voiceless woman full of anger. Her smoked nails hammered her evaporated heart snivelling in the grotty kitchen of disaster. Her face, depleted, cauterised. Her eyes wheezed shame at what she knew would happen to her daughter, again and all over again.”
― Laura Gentile, Seraphic Addiction

“I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.”
― Lewis F. Powell Jr.

“The child is father of the manâ€�.attributed to Sigmund Freud, but believed to have been coined by a well-known poet years before Freud's time”
― Shirl Solomon, Knowing Your Child through His Handwriting and Drawings

“Childhood has its secrets and its mysteries; but who can tell or who can explain them!”
― Max Muller

“If you are waiting to gain power to do something; then there is no difference between you and an unborn child.”
― M.F. Moonzajer