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Previous Quotes of the Month for 2015

January

"Listening is where love begins."

- Fred Rogers

February

"When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life."

- John Lennon

March

"Our survival as a species depends on our ability to recognize that our well-being and the well-being of others are in fact one and the same."

- Marshall Rosenberg

April

"Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside - children have their own agendas and timescales. As they find out more about their world and their place in it, they work hard not to let adults hurry them. We need to hear their voices."

- Cathy Nutbrown

May

"Loving a baby is a circular business, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give, the more you get, and the more you get, the more you feel like giving."

- Penelope Leach

June

"Should a child develop a fever, all kinds of measures are taken to insure his comfort and improvement. No one would think of telling a child to 'behave himself and get rid of the flu.' We would consider it insane to punish a child because he had measles.

"What a blessing it would be if there were a 'thermometer' to measure the emotional health of our children. We who rush to our children's assistance when they have a fever, might then also rush to our children's aid when they signal a lack of love, or wonder, or appreciation.

"Since there is no method for measuring our children's emotional needs, perhaps it would be wise for us to offer them a little extra love, a little extra care, and a little extra understanding, just in case."

- John A. Taylor,
Notes on an Unhurried Journey

July

"The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him. He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it.

"To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense. ... School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning."

- John Holt,
How Children Learn

August

"Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list."

- Letty Cottin Pogrebin,
The First Ms. Reader, 1972.

September

"It will be gone before you know it. The fingerprints on the wall appear higher and higher. Then suddenly they disappear."

- Dorothy Eislin

October

"Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves."

- Sir Ken Robinson

November

"One thing I learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun."

- Jane Goodall

December

"I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages six, four, and one. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less."

- Anna Quindlen,
Loud and Clear

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