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Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.

Judith Viorst

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Judith Viorst
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: February 2
Author
Journalist
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Grows
Endlessly
Living
Fantasies
Infancy
Refusal
Neurotic
Golden
Fantasy
Nurtured
Grow
Neurosis

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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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No-fault guilt: This is when, instead of trying to figure out who's to blame, everyone pays.
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Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.
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Not listening is probably the commonest unkindness of married life, and one that creates - more devastatingly than an eternity of forgotten birthdays and misguided Christmas gifts - an atmosphere of not loving and not caring.
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I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
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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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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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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?
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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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Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying I love you.
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Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.
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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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Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.
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Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it.
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