Jody Williams Quotes

I honestly didn't always want kids - for a very long time, it just wasn't a path I saw myself on. I wasn't even sure I wanted to get married!

I didn't wake up one day and think, 'I'm not going to have children.' My mother was a housewife and brought up three children, so I just thought it would happen.

I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. It's funny - people ask me that, and I don't know what to tell them.

The expectation was I would get married and become a mother and settle down. We didn't have any role models. We saw teachers and doctors and nurses, but I'm not a teacher, and there was no possibility of being a doctor or a nurse. I had to work and find my own way.

I never had to say to myself, 'OK now, I've got to grow up and work for a bank, or go and sell real estate.' I never had to make that kind of break.

I don't think you need to get married necessarily. Girls just assume they will get married and have babies, but that isn't the right thing for everyone.

I don't want to get married - I've been there and done that. So I know what I'm talking about when I say that. And for everybody has a different path - find out your path! And if you want to do it, don't let people make you feel inadequate because you wanted to do something that's different.

This was what you did in the '50s: You get married, get a job, put your husband through graduate school, and have two kids - a girl and a boy.

The whole 1950s notion was find the right girl, get married, move to the suburbs and then hang out with the guys while she stayed home with the babies. I felt that was sort of sad.

I don't like to make my life like a book.

You know, I'm still deciding what I'm going to be when I grow up.

I can't tell you how many people would say to me as a teenager, 'Why don't you grow up and start thinking about getting a real job?'

Sometimes I wake up and think, 'How did I get here?'

Every single person, pretty much, is taught what they're supposed to do: go to school, get a job, find someone to love, get married, have kids, raise the kids, and then die. Nobody questions that. What if you want to do something different?

If I could have married my wife and been a sports writer for the past 30 years, I wouldn't be sitting here - but I don't think I'd be sitting someplace where I was sorry to be sitting.

Our deeds disguise us. People need endless time to try on their deeds, until each knows the proper deeds for him to do. But every day, every hour, rushes by. There is no time.

I think it's unreasonable to expect kids at 17 to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives. And actually, I guess I had a desire to be an artist, and I did enroll in art school out of high school.

I've always dreamed of becoming a mother. I thought I would get married and do it all the traditional way, but life kept going on, my career kept me busy - and I had not stopped to become a mommy.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

A woman who doesn't want to have kids is sort of a mystery to people. That's a question they're asked the minute they get married, it's a question they're asked constantly, 'Don't you want to have kids?' And I feel like that's completely unfair.

It is a lot to learn, and unique, but it is commonplace here in Atlanta where the man takes care of things and the woman becomes a homemaker, and later on in the relationship, a mother, which isn't the things that I ever considered. I think Cody thought that I would want that for my life since he grew up in that, but that is just not me.

You don't have to get married and have a family, like a lot of women try, to live the American Dream. There's nothing wrong if you're in your 40s and don't have kids and are president of your own company.

Once I hit 25, people started asking me about marriage and kids all the time. I remember hitting 35 and some would ask the same questions with a strange tone, as if my life was somehow over because I hadn't yet settled into their version of happiness.

My generation of women was the last for whom marriage and a family were the goal.

I'm now in my late 30s, and I've been thinking a lot about marriage and family. To be honest, I've decided to push aside thoughts of marriage and personal questions for now.