Quote

We begin life with loss. We are cast from the womb without an apartment, a charge plate, a job or a car. We are sucking, sobbing, clinging, helpless babies.

Judith Viorst

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Judith Viorst
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: February 2
Author
Journalist
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Jobs
Apartment
Sobbing
Without
Charge
Sucking
Life
Cast
Clinging
Casts
Plate
Car
Plates
Begin
Womb
Loss
Babies
Baby
Helpless

More quotes by Judith Viorst

Image
we love as soon as we learn to distinguish a separate 'you' and 'me.' Love is our attempt to assuage the terror and isolation of that separateness.
Judith Viorst
Image
Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.
Judith Viorst
Image
Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.
Judith Viorst
Image
Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
Judith Viorst
Image
I had it together on Sunday. By Monday at noon it had cracked. On Tuesday debris Was descending on me. And by Wednesday no part was intact. On Thursday I picked up some pieces. On Friday I picked up the rest. By Saturday, late, It was almost set straight. And on Sunday the world was impressed With how well I had got it together.
Judith Viorst
Image
Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the wine taste richer, the laughter ring louder because they are there.
Judith Viorst
Image
Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.
Judith Viorst
Image
My mom says I'm her sugarplum. My mom says I'm her lamb. My mom says I'm completely perfect Just the way I am. My mom says I'm a super-special wonderful terrific little guy. My mom just had another baby. Why?
Judith Viorst
Image
It is true that the present is powerfully shaped by the past. But it is also true that ... insight at any age keeps us from singing the same sad songs again.
Judith Viorst
Image
Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our second other-elaborates on them.
Judith Viorst
Image
Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.
Judith Viorst
Image
When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the street, I always hope he's dead.
Judith Viorst
Image
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.
Judith Viorst
Image
Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.
Judith Viorst
Image
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying I love you.
Judith Viorst
Image
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.
Judith Viorst
Image
Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.
Judith Viorst
Image
For many men the denial of dependency on their mother is repeated in their subsequent relationships, sometimes by an absence of any sexual interest in women, sometimes by a pattern of loving and leaving them.
Judith Viorst
Image
We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.
Judith Viorst
Image
A normal adolescent is so restless and twitchy and awkward that he can mange to injure his knee--not playing soccer, not playing football--but by falling off his chair in the middle of French class.
Judith Viorst