Quote

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

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Judith Viorst
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: February 2
Author
Journalist
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Shows
Rhythm
Ally
Stills
Response
Safer
Home
Second
Presents
Still
Show
Abandoned
Love
Hate
Allies
Roam
Father
Connect
Optional
Makes
Base
Rhythms
Mother
Mad
Responses

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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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Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying I love you.
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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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Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.
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Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.
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I think I'll move to Australia.
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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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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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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 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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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.
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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.
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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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Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our second other-elaborates on them.
Judith Viorst