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1 " My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station. And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives. "
― Douglas Coupland , Life After God
2 " Strange are the ways of God. At times He showers His gifts when we least expect them. Treat each day as an important one; you never know He may have decided to send you a gift through a small child looking for help or an unknown stranger seeking directions to a place or a person unable to pay his coffee bill because his pocket has been picked or a lady on the next table who absent mindedly leaves her purse in the café. Anyone of them could be the carrier of God’s gifts. Be alert His miracles can come up any time, in any form and through anyone. Your life may be about to change, His Angel is on the way so don’t be caught napping. Don’t treat today or any day as just another day. "
3 " Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense his own already ... It is like a small child going to its father and saying, 'Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.' It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction. "
― C.S. Lewis , Mere Christianity
4 " There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write. "
― Mignon McLaughlin
5 " You laugh because what's fearful and unknown is also what's funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny... but it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power. "
― Stephen King , It
6 " And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life. "
― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire
7 " Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book... That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart form the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society's technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader, to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic. "
― Martha Parravano
8 " We all need salespeople who help people with the same enthusiasm shown by a small child describing the best Christmas present EVER "
― Chris Murray , Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction
9 " He continued to attack the gate. His arm started to ache. The hammer was designed for neither brute nor force. " Are you all right up there?" asked Eleanor. " Want me to go see if I can find a small child to give you a lift?" " Maybe if we swapped positions and you condescended at the gate, we'd get through faster? "
10 " My mother once said that having a small child is like having a permanently drunk houseguest. "
11 " But that did no harm, and a sad young mind found a way to match things up with an antagonist. Now, just stand a child up against your body. How tall is it? Possibly only up to your hip. Still, a man,—or an animal thinking that it is a man—will slap, whip, or viciously yank an arm of so frail, so soft a tiny body! That is what I call a coward!! By golly! almost a criminal! If a tot is what you call naughty, (and no child voluntarily is,) why not lift that young body up onto your lap, and talk—don’t shout—about what it just did? Shouting gains nothing with a tot. Man can shout at Man, at dogs, and at farm animals; but a man who shouts at a child is, at that instant, sinking in his own muck of bullyism; and bullyism is a sin, if anything in this world is. Ah Youth! You glorious dawn of Mankind! You bright, happy, glowing morning Sun; not at full brilliancy of noon, I know, but unavoidably on your way! Youth! How I do thrill at taking your warm, soft hand; walking with you; talking with you; but, most important of all, laughing with you! That is Man’s pathway to glory. A man who drops blossoms in passing, will carry joy to folks along his way; a man who drops crumbs will also do a kindly act; but a man who drops kind words to a sobbing child will find his joy continuing for many a day; for blossoms will dry up; crumbs may blow away; but a kind word to a child may start a blossom growing in that young mind, which will so far surpass what an unkindly man might drop, as an orchid will surpass a wisp of grass. Just stop a bit and look back at your footprints along your past pathway. Did you put many humps in that soil which a small child might trip on? Did you angrily slam a door, which might so jolt a high-strung tot as to bring on nights and nights of insomnia? Did you so constantly snarl at it that it don’t want you around? In fact, did you put anything in that back-path of yours which could bring sorrow to a child? Or start its distrust of you, as its rightful guardian? If so, go back right now, man, and fix up such spots by kindly acts from now on. Or, jump into a pond, and don’t crawl out again!! For nobody wants you around! "
― Ernest Vincent Wright , Gadsby
12 " I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, " Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation. "
13 " You found it,” she announced.I smiled, knowing what she meant. She and I’d had conversations since I was a small child about finding true love. She’d fallen deep with my grampa, who I hadn’t met, he’d died before I was born in a work accident, but she’d never sought out anyone else. She couldn’t imagine her life without him. She’d told me that some people could find love over and over but others found it once and it was so perfect, so ‘it’ that they’d never look elsewhere, even if they lost it. They’d had such good from it that they were topped up for life. "
― D.D. Prince , Detour (Beautiful Biker, #1)
14 " As we grow older, we forget how near to the ground we once were. I do not mean merely because our heads were lower down than they are now, though of course that comes into it; but near in the sense of kinship. A small child is aware of the sights and smells and textures of the ground with an acute awareness that we lose in growing up. "
― Rosemary Sutcliff , Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
15 " The amazing aftermath of Birmingham, the sweeping Negro Revolution, revealed to people all over the land that there are no outsiders in all these fifty states of America. When a police dog buried his fangs in the ankle of a small child in Birmingham, he buried his fangs in the ankle of every American. The bell of man's inhumanity to man does not toll for any one man. It tolls for you, for me, for all of us. "
― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait
16 " Writer Brigid Brophy exposes [their motives] with great precision:" Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. These slogans have a long history. After being used to justify slave traders, ruthless industrialists, and contractors who had found that the most economically 'realistic' method of cleaning a chimney was to force a small child to climb it, they have now been passed on, like an heirloom, to the factory farmers. 'We mustn't be sentimental' tries to persuade us that factory farming isn't, in fact, cruel. It implies that the whole problem had been invented by our sloppy imaginations. "
17 " There was another problem with Emma's father, difficult for a small child who already thought of herself as greedy - his way of trying to keep her attention, to bribe her, with gifts. On each vof her visits, he would appear with you presents, beautifully wrapped> And her confusion that she liked - and wanted - the presents, but not the man, was painful. He used 'sparkly Sellotape' and cut things into nice shapes and she wistfully w "
18 " For a small child there is no division between playing and learning between the things he or she does just for fun and things that are educational. The child learns while living and any part of living that is enjoyable is also play. "
19 " As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job. "