Mem Fox Quotes

I don’t know why some people have children at all if they know that they can only take a few weeks off work.

Books don’t harm kids; they arm them.

I think that my favourite animal is a baby possum, or a joey. The face of a really little joey is so divine – so, so gorgeous.

Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.

Reading aloud and talking about what we’re reading sharpens children’s brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

I was the most Australian child ever in the world, even though my home was in Africa.

I have very little patience with children.

DO NOT attempt to bring up other people’s children through your text.

When I say to a parent, “read to a child”, I don’t want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

As everyone knows, nothing is sweeter than tiny baby fingers and chubby baby toes.

My mother was a very difficult woman to please. She was the sort of woman who thought that if I were praised I would get above myself.

If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.

I don’t go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

I think sometimes we rush through countries, ticking off the attractions, but that’s missing the point.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

Writing a picture book is like writing ‘War and Peace’ in Haiku.

I made a lot of friends at school, and they were all Africans. I could have felt very different. I didn’t feel different, I didn’t notice the color of their skin, I didn’t notice the color of my skin and I have remembered that all my life.

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.

Putting babies as young as two weeks into child care for the first year of their life, for 60 hours a week, will cause their brains damage.