Judith Viorst Quotes

“Strength is the capacity to break a Hershey bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.”

— Judith Viorst

I think I'll move to Australia.

— Judith Viorst

“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

“Some days are like that. Even in Australia.”

— Judith Viorst

I didn't really notice that he had a funny nose.
And he certainly looked better all dressed up in fancy clothes.
He's not nearly as attractive as he seemed the other night.
So I think I'll just pretend that this glass slipper feels too tight.

— Judith Viorst

“In fact, I would like to propose that central to understanding our lives is understanding how we deal with loss. I would like to propose in this book that the people we are and the lives that we lead are determined, for better and worse, by our loss experiences.”

— Judith Viorst

“There is no ache more Deadly than the striving to be oneself. -Yevgeniy Vinokurov”

— 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

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

“Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.”

— Judith Viorst

“Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.”

— Judith Viorst

“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.”

— 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

“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

“Recognize joy when it arrives in the plain brown wrappings of everyday life.”

— Judith Viorst

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

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

“A normal adolescent isn't a normal adolescent
if he acts normal.”

— Judith Viorst

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

— Judith Viorst

“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

“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

Late birds get worms while early birds get tired.

— Judith Viorst

“Mid-grade readers don't have short attention spans, they just have low boredom tolerance.”

— Judith Viorst

“Serious skeptics, true believers, and seekers of every stripe will want to read Mitch Horowitz's vibrant, probing, and richly researched account of the impact of the positive-thinking movement on every aspect of American life today. Filled with a cast of remarkable characters and many lively tales, One Simple Idea is a readable, responsible examination of the limits and possibilities of mind-power as a source of constructive transformation.”

— Judith Viorst

“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

“Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.”

— Judith Viorst

“Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.”

— Judith Viorst

“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

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

— Judith Viorst

“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

“If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty-and frightened too.”

— Judith Viorst

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

— Judith Viorst

“I don't intend to stop showing a little cleavage. Nor do I intend to stop flashing a little thigh.”

— Judith Viorst

“For some it takes a lifetime to find true love, But for the lucky ones a lifetime is merely enough to share the love they've found.”

— 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

“Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can't be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and the skills to get what we want within the limitations imposed by reality - a reality which consists of diminished powers, restricted freedoms and, with the people we love, imperfect connections.”

— Judith Viorst

“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

There is a time to separate from our mother. But unless we are ready to separate-unless we are ready to leave her and be left-anything is better than separation.

— Judith Viorst

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.

— 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

“Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.”

— Judith Viorst

“Many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adolescent love.”

— Judith Viorst

“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

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

— Judith Viorst

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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.”

— Judith Viorst