Judith Viorst Quotes

My mom says I'm her sugarplum.
My mom says I'm her lamb.
My mom says I'm completely perfect
Just the way I am.
My mom says I'm a super-special wonderful terrific little guy.
My mom just had another baby.
Why?

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.

Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone
childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.

It is true love because when he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the middle of the street, I always hope he's dead.

There comes a time when we aren't allowed not to know.

It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My mom says some days are like that.

...we should never grow so old, or change so much, that we cannot find room in our hearts for the wisdom of children's books.

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

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

Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces, and then eat just one of the pieces.

Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway.

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

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

Absence makes the heart grow frozen, not fonder.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

As we acquire new aches and new pains, our health care is, of necessity, being supplied by internists, cardiologists, dermatologists, podiatrists, urologists, periodontists, gynecologists and psychiatrists, from all of whom we want a second opinion. We want a second opinion that says, don't worry, you are going to live forever.

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.

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

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.

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's only when you love him that you hate him.

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.

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.

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.

I think I'll move to Australia.

We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety
and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.

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

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.

We each are artists of the self, creating a collage -- a new and original work of art -- out of scraps and fragments of identifications. The people with whom we identify are, positively or negatively, always important to us. Our feelings toward them are, in some way, always intense.

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

For we lose not only by death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on.

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.

Indeed, analyst Robert Bak calls orgasm "the perfect promise between love and death," the means by which we repatriate separation of mother and child through the momentary extinction of the self. It is true that few of us consciously climb into a lover's bed in the hope of finding our mommy between the sheets. But the sexual loss of our separateness (which may scare people so badly they cannot have orgasm) brings us pleasure, in part, because it unconsciously repeats our first connection.

I could be such a wonderful wife to another wife's husband.

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.

No-fault guilt: This is when, instead of trying to figure out who's to blame, everyone pays.