Virginia Satir Quotes

Because I see my own boys growing, and I see other children growing and I just have such a connection.

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

There's a constant chatter in our house, whether it's giggling or screaming or crying or banging. I love it. I love it. I love it. I hate it when they're gone. I hate it. Maybe it's nice to be in a hotel room for a day - 'Oh, nice, I can finally read a paper.' But then, by the next day, I miss that cacophony, all that life.

My kids really are my center. They create a beautiful chaos. It's always a nice chaos with them.

Every day I ask my husband, 'Is it possible to over kiss your child?' I literally think I kiss him 200 times in a day. It's not normal!

Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that’s who. They know where they are, do you, do you?

I have four kids - they're 19 to 33 - that I love more than anything.

The seventies was a time when a lot of people didn't tell their children they were adopted.

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

People talked about being a parent, or being a mother or a father. We don't talk about "wiving" our husbands or "friending" our friends, or "childing" our parents. We just talk about being in a relationship with those people. You don't measure whether your marriage was good based on whether or not your husband is better now than he was 10 years ago, or whether your friend is richer than when they first became your friend. The relationships between parents and children is a kind of love, rather than a kind of work.

Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old. Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.

You’re not supposed to dislike your own child. You were supposed to like them no matter what, even if they were not what you wanted.

Someone once told me that children are like heroin. You always want more. Yet first-borns are special because you'll never have your first child again.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them. Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.

My parents loved me. My father used to carry me around on my shoulders. I know my father loved me. All families love their children, and we were good boys.

Children spell love with four letters: T-I-M-E.

I look at the field, and I think about the boy who just made the touchdown. I think that these are the glory days for that boy, and this moment will just be another story someday because all the people who make touchdowns and home runs will become somebody's dad. And when his children look at his yearbook photograph, they will think that their dad was rugged and handsome and looked a lot happier than they are. I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.

Children never lie...I remember my daughter standing in her crib the first time I gave her caviar. I put it on bread. She ate it and said, "Encore, Papa."

The happiest and holiest children in the world are the children whose fathers succeed in winning both their tender affection and their reverential and loving fear. And they are the children who will come to understand most easily the mystery of the fatherhood of God.

I have more pictures of my children than my father ever looked at me.