"A child!" said Edith, looking at her. "When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman - artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men - before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride tonight."
What the universal Church holds, not as instituted [invented] by councils but as something always held, is most correctly believed to have been handed down by apostolic authority. Since others respond for children, so that the celebration of the sacrament may be complete for them, it is certainly availing to them for their consecration, because they themselves are not able to respond.
The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.
There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers.
What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.
All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we've done to make so many children's hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass - what values we must live by.
Children who are decked with prince's robes and who have jeweled chains round their necks lose all pleasure in play; their dress hampers them at every step. In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust, they keep themselves from the world and are afraid ever to move. Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.
I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.
Sometimes it may seem as if progress is stalled but what history of post-war Germany shows is that strength and determination and focus and adherence to the values that we care about will result in a better future for our children and our grandchildren.
Take two kids in competition for their parents' love and attention. Add to that the envy that one child feels for the accomplishments of the other; the resentment that each child feels for the privileges of the other; the personal frustrations that they don't dare let out on anyone else but a brother or sister, and it's not hard to understand why in families across the land, the sibling relationship contains enough emotional dynamite to set off rounds of daily explosions.
There's a place in you that you must keep inviolate. You must keep it pristine. Clean. So that nobody has a right to curse you or treat you badly. Nobody. No mother, father, no wife, no husband, no-nobody. You have to have a place where you say: 'Stop it. Back up. Don't you know I'm a child of God?
I don't know any other job that the off-the-field issues - especially something personal like that - affects your job. But as far as the parenting lesson, no [I understood that]. To me it was so simple, it was a situation where I disciplined my child and it didn't turn out the way I wanted.