Judith Viorst Quotes

In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation.

Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.

If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

I do think you are supposed to go through wars with your child because otherwise the tearing apart that has to happen when they go off to lead their own life would be unbearable.

Until I got married, when I used to go out, my mother said good bye to me as though I was emigrating.

Young people need their own private places which mothers don't belong to, even if they want mother all around the edge of that.

Being sent away to school was no different from my biological mother giving me away.

My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I'm 31-years-old, and I don't want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It's humiliating.

However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.

I remember being two, maybe, and hearing my mum's typewriter in the other room and sticking my hands under the door and screaming, 'Mum! Mum!' I was so angry she wouldn't come out. I got used to it quickly.

I don't want to rip families apart. I don't want to be sending parents away from children.

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.

One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger.

I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.

Children, when they are little, they make parents fools; when great, mad.

The young need old men. They need men who are not ashamed of age, not pathetic imitations of themselves. ... Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

A child embarrassed by his mother,” she said, “is just a child who hasn’t lived long enough.

I firmly believe, however, that if your children have never hated you, you have failed as a parent.

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away.

My kids are not interested in anything I do. And I mean that not in any dis to my children or dis to me. My kids have their own life, they could give a sh*t what I do.

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

Children consider disliking their parents natural, but if the dislike is returned, they are outraged.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.