Joan Didion Quotes

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.

A child's first teacher is its mother.

The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

It's harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child.

No adult can bear a child’s burden or grow up in his stead.

When you have a child yourself, you go back and think about how you were parented, how you were mothered and what your parents did for you, and you just want to be able to call and ask them.

I have friends who have children, and they have told me how remarkable it is to have a new life that is a piece of your own flesh anf blood. But I --" "I realized that I didn't love her because she was a piece of me, I loved her because she was a piece of you.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we'd had.

All my children are my babies. They're our babies.

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

The thing you can do better than anyone else is love your children, because they're your children.

Fathers and mothers are too absorbed in business and housekeeping to study their children, and cherish that sweet and natural confidence which is a child's surest safeguard, and a parent's subtlest power.

They say that parenting is like dancing. You take one step, your child takes another.

As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.

We are always children to our mothers.

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 will never understand children. I never pretended to. I meet mothers all the time who make resolutions to themselves. 'I'm going to ... go out of my way to show them I am interested in them and what they do. I am going to understand my children.' These women end up making rag rugs, using blunt scissors.

Children can scarcely be fashioned to meet with our likes and our purpose. Just as God did us give them, so must we hold them and love them, nurture and teach them to fullness and leave them to be what they are.

The bond between parent and child is chemical, fierce, and inexplicable, even if that parent is a sworn killer. This connection cannot be measured; it at once more subtle and more powerful than science.