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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.

Judith Viorst

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Judith Viorst
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: February 2
Author
Journalist
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Love
Separateness
Distinguish
Isolation
Separate
Attempt
Terror
Soon
Learn
Assuage

More quotes by Judith Viorst

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I think I'll move to Australia.
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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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Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
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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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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.
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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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Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
Judith Viorst
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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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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
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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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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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Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.
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