Jodi Picoult Quotes

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

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.

Parenting is a profoundly reciprocal process: we, the shapers of our children's lives, are also being shaped. As we struggle to beparents, we are forced to encounter ourselves; and if we are willing to look at what is happening between us and our children, we may learn how we came to be who we are.

I've always taken my love of children from my father. He was a children magnet. Suddenly, having my first child hit home what my dad went through.

Children enhance you.

So you eat, you sleep, and then this wonderful child comes out, but you don't feel like you have any control over that process, over her, over her character and who she is.

My children were the center of my life.

I am a family man, and I have children.

My kids know who I am on the basketball court, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter about the basketball. I am their dad, and that is all that matters.

I got four kids.

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.

I feel different. You know this many times over, because you are a parent, but it transforms you. It's this incredible experience where, in one way, you are still very much yourself, and in some ways you become even more connected to the rest of yourself. All of a sudden, you just get more connected to your child self, and your teenage self, and all these selves that you've maybe been abandoning at every date post that you pass.

Having children takes the focus off yourself, which I'm really grateful for. I'm so tired of thinking about myself. I'm sick of myself. You feel you want to be there and not miss out on anything. It's a true joy and a very profound love. You can write a book, you can make a movie, you can paint a painting, but having kids is the most extraordinary thing I've ever taken on.

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 sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to 'know' as to 'feel'.

We grow because the clamorous, permanent presence of our children forces us to put their needs before ours. We grow because our love for our children urges us to change as nothing else in our lives has the power to do. We grow (if we're willing to grow, that is: not every parent is willing) because being a parent helps us stop being a child.

I feel my life has more meaning because I am responsible for another life, although I don't have control over what Lucian - my son - is going to do. He's definitely going to carve his own way.

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.

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

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

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.

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

You become responsible for a human being, and a lot of people talk about how they've never felt love like this before. You hear all these things before you have a child, and they're all kind of true. It's just dealing with the overwhelming responsibility of like I'm the protector of this child that affected me the most.

A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes...And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.