Robin McKinley Quotes

Familial betrayal is, to me, the most heartbreaking kind - because if you can't trust your family to love you and protect you, who can you really trust?

Right now, we say in a traditional home one parent stays home with the children and the other provides the financial support for that family. That is the acceptable and right thing to do. If we begin to expand that, not only do we dilute the resources that are available, we begin to dilute things like health care, retirement, all the things offered to families that help them be a family.

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

People love you when you're successful, but if you're not, who really cares about you?

When a man is forced into early retirement, he is often being 'given up for a younger man.' Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being 'given up for a younger woman' is for a woman... Why do many men get more upset by retirement than women do from the empty nest when their children leave home? When females retire from children, they can try a career; when a man retires from a career, his children are gone.

In life's rich beauty pageant we put children on a stage, said flash your soft white belly child, but just don't act your age.

It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

The love for a child is more an unconditional sort of love ... Although some parents are really narcissistic. In general, I think there is an expectation that love will be unconditional, but obviously it's not - even after living with someone for years.

The greatest thing you can do for your children is love your spouse.

When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

Society teaches us conditional love; i.e., "I love you if you are the way I want you to be."

People will love you and support you when it's beneficial.

For many years, people would say, "Only child? Must have been terrible," and I wanted to say, "You are mentally ill, because it was the greatest." You got all the attention. You never had to share anything. No one ever ate your food. No one ever took your toys. But the unintended consequence was that I didn't appreciate that being universally loved was not only not required for happiness, but also not possible.

The European problem is that it assumes that the minute a woman has a child, the mother identity subsumes the professional identity. Now she's the mother, above all, and we must give her all this time.

What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.

This mother needs happy, reputable children, and that one needs unhappy ones: otherwise she cannot show her kindness as a mother.

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

Whatever you do they will love you; even if they don't love you they are connected to you till you die. You can be boring and tedious with -sisters, whereas you have to put on a good face with friends.

I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.

Now give me a kiss, say you love me and off you go." "Sure, Aunt Lu," I said, and I gave her the kiss she wanted. Then I ran out and caught my bus. I didn't say I loved her. I guess I did. But asking someone to say they love you--and she always asked--is like buying yourself a birthday present. It's more than likely exactly what you want. But it must make you feel awfully sad to get it.

Man is the hunter; women are the game; those sleek and shining creatures of the chase. We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; they love us for it, and we ride them down.

Love is for friends & pets...and family...only if they really love you as unconditionally as your friends and pets.

You can have children and love them with all your heart and soul, and love your family, and it's still OK to have a fire in you. That doesn't have anything to do with your family.