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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.
Judith Viorst
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Judith Viorst
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: February 2
Author
Journalist
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Place
Sun
Children
Ordinary
Life
Quiet
Safe
Lighting
Friend
Pleasures
Hair
Slow
Pleasure
Dancing
Child
Embrace
More quotes by Judith Viorst
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.
Judith Viorst
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
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.
Judith Viorst
Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.
Judith Viorst
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
[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.
Judith Viorst
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
READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that's tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw.
Judith Viorst
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
Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.
Judith Viorst
Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our second other-elaborates on them.
Judith Viorst
Late birds get worms while early birds get tired.
Judith Viorst
Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.
Judith Viorst
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.
Judith Viorst
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
We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.
Judith Viorst
Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.
Judith Viorst
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
I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
Judith Viorst
Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.
Judith Viorst
