An Excerpt About Children

When we talk with children about things that matter we are also dealing with our own childhood. We look back to injustices we experienced -- the times when we told the truth and it was not believed, the times we were blamed and were not responsible, the many occasions on which we were humiliated and resolved never to inflict this upon anyone else. We remember the positive experiences, too -- being free to explore in the countryside or play hopscotch and ball games in the street, for example, belonging to a close-knit extended family and celebrating family festivals with aunts, uncles and grandparents -- and we feel sad that we can offer these things to our children only as our own treasured memories. We sift through the values we learned, or those we felt were inflicted upon us, as children, reinterpreting them in terms of our adult priorities and changing world.

The speed of change -- new technology, new diseases, new threats and new opportunities -- must make us reflect carefully on everything we are trying to teach our children. For one thing is sure: they will not inhabit a society identical to that into which we were born, and by the time they are into their twenties or thirties, it may have changed beyond recognition. They will need the flexibility, courage and the strong personal values both to see and to adapt to new challenges, and to strive with others to find solutions to environmental and human problems that may appear overwhelming.

By Sheila Kitzinger and Celia Kitzinger

Quotes About Memory

The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.


We do not remember days; we remember moments. ~Cesare Pavese


Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. ~Jean de Boufflers


Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember. ~Seneca


Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us. ~ Oscar Wilde



Memory is the mother of all wisdom. ~ Aeschylus


Every man's memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Leonard Huxley



A moment lasts all of a second, but the memory lives on forever.



Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope. ~ Thomas Carlyle


Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero


The true art of memory is the art of attention. ~ Dr Samuel Johnson


The heart that truly loves never forgets. ~ Proverb quotes


Memory is the library of the mind. ~ Francis Fauvel


Liars need good memories. ~ French Proverb quotes


Souvenirs are perishable; fortunately, memories are not. ~ Susan Spano



Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. ~ Kevin Arnold


A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise. ~ Cardinal John Henry Newman


Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. ~Diane Ackerman


A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day. ~ Anna Mary Robertson Moses


A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime.

Paintings By Claude Monet
Who is Claude Monet?