Judith Viorst Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Friends broaden our horizons. They serve as new models with whom we can identify. They allow us to be ourselves-and accept us that way. They enhance our self-esteem because they think we're okay, because we matter to them. And because they matter to us-for various reasons, at various levels of intensity-they enrich the quality of our emotional life.

  Judith Viorst

  Friendship, Self Esteem, Emotional

  8 Copy quote

• Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?

  Judith Viorst

  Superstitions, Doe, Cost

  Judith Viorst (1987). “Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.”, Fireside

  14 Copy quote

• Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer...from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger.

  Judith Viorst

  Sweet, Children, Parent

  7 Copy quote

• Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.

  Judith Viorst

  Travel, Suffering, Broads

  Judith Viorst (1987). “Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.”, Fireside

  4 Copy quote

• Late birds get worms while early birds get tired.

  Judith Viorst

  Tired, Bird, Worms

  Judith Viorst (1976). “How Did I Get to Be 40 & Other Atrocities”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Self, Long

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• Eventually we will learn that the loss of indivisible love is another of our necessary losses, that loving extends beyond the mother-child pair, that most of the love we receive in this world is love we will have to share--and that sharing begins at home, with our sibling rivals.

  Judith Viorst

  Mother, Children, Sibling

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.86, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose.

  Judith Viorst

  Clever, Loss, Passionate

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy 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

  Mother, Father, Hate

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.74, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying "I love you.

  Judith Viorst

  Love You, Soul, May

  Judith Viorst (1987). “Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.”, Fireside

  8 Copy quote

• A normal adolescent isn't a normal adolescent
  if he acts normal.

  Judith Viorst

  Normal, Ifs

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.150, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

• We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.

  Judith Viorst

  Self, Self Love, Infancy

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.68, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.

  Judith Viorst

  Love, Feels, Short Love

  Judith Viorst (1987). “Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.”, Fireside

  12 Copy quote

• If we are the younger, we may envy the older. If we are the older, we may feel that the younger is always being indulged. In otherwords, no matter what position we hold in family order of birth, we can prove beyond a doubt that we're being gypped.

  Judith Viorst

  Order, Envy, Doubt

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Love Is, Isolation, Terror

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.

  Judith Viorst

  Children, Age, Faces

  8 Copy quote

• But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

  Judith Viorst

  Girl, Age, Trying

  Judith Viorst (1970). “It's hard to be hip over thirty and other tragedies of married life”

  16 Copy quote

• Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on--our lost narcissism lives on--in our ego ideal.

  Judith Viorst

  Dream, Giving Up, Growing Up

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.140, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there's gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

  Judith Viorst

  Running, Morning, Mistake

  Shelly Markham, Judith Viorst (1999). “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: A Musical Based on the Book by Judith Viorst”, p.21, Dramatic Publishing

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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.

  Judith Viorst

  Children, Parent, Needs

  4 Copy quote

• Control cannot be called conscience until we are able to take it inside us and make it our own, until--in spite of the fact that the wrongs we have done or imagined will never be punished or known--we nonetheless feel that the clutch in the stomach, that chill upon the soul, that self-inflicted misery called guilt.

  Judith Viorst

  Self, Soul, Guilt

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.131, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Marriage, Caring, Atmosphere

  4 Copy quote

• Being in love is better than being in jail, a dentist's chair, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia, but not if he doesn't love you back.

  Judith Viorst

  Love You, Being In Love, Love Is

  Judith Viorst (1987). “Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.”, Fireside

  4 Copy quote

• We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information . . . strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the . . . inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.

  Judith Viorst

  Depressing, Children, Knowing

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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.

  Judith Viorst

  Lying, Telling The Truth, Truth Is

  4 Copy quote

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