Quote

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

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Judith Viorst
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: February 2
Author
Journalist
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Mother
Denial
Women
Sexual
Many
Patterns
Sometimes
Absence
Men
Relationships
Subsequent
Leaving
Dependency
Loving
Repeated
Interest
Pattern

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Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
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Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.
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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.
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Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.
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We have to divide mother love with our brothers and sisters. Our parents can help us cope with the loss of our dream of absolute love. But they cannot make us believe that we haven't lost it.
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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.
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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.
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The need to become a separate self is as urgent as the yearning to merge forever. And as long as we, not our mother, initiate parting, and as long as our mother remains reliably there, it seems possible to risk, and even to revel in, standing alone.
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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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We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.
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One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.
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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.
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Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.
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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.
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Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our second other-elaborates on them.
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Late birds get worms while early birds get tired.
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If his mother was drowning and I was drowning and he had to choose one of us to save, He says he'd save me.
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Our father presents an optional set of rhythms and responses for us to connect to. As a second home base, he makes it safer to roam. With him as an ally--a love--it is safer, too, to show that we're mad when we're mad at our mother. We can hate and not be abandoned, hate and still love.
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I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
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