Judith Viorst Quotes About Children
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Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.
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[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.
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Eventually we will learn that the loss of indivisible love is another of our necessary losses, that loving extends beyond the mother-child pair, that most of the love we receive in this world is love we will have to share--and that sharing begins at home, with our sibling rivals.
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Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer...from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger.
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We grow because the clamorous, permanent presence of our children forces us to put their needs before ours. We grow because our love for our children urges us to change as nothing else in our lives has the power to do. We grow (if we're willing to grow, that is: not every parent is willing) because being a parent helps us stop being a child.
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You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.
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We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information . . . strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the . . . inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.
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Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.
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We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.
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