Tibor Kalman Quotes

I don't want to wake up and see my kids going off to college and wonder what happened.

Children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.

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

I spend a lot of time thinking about this business of letting go - letting go of the children God gives to us for such a brief time before they go off on their own; letting go of old homes, old friends, old places and old dreams.

My children are grown now, they are more independent.

Half the bloody world is going through a divorce; more than that are having children. All of us have parents who are dying or have died. It's just the life cycle.

Oh, September! It is so soon for you to lose your friends to good work and strange loves and high ambitions. The sadness of that is too grown-up for you. Like whiskey and voting, it is a dangerous and heady business, as heavy as years. If I could keep your little tribe together forever, I would. I do so want to be generous. But some stories sprout bright vines that tendril off beyond our sight, carrying the folk we love best with them, and if I knew how to accept that with grace, I would share the secret.

Someone once told me that children are like heroin. You always want more. Yet first-borns are special because you'll never have your first child again.

Raising children changes everything. It's a complete cliché to say that, but it's really true.

The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

The better you are as a parent, the richer the nest you've built, the more difficult it is for your kids to leave. So they have to invent things to dislike about you. And they're brilliant at it.

Some authority on parenting once said, "Hold them very close and then let them go." This is the hardest truth for a father to learn: that his children are continuously growing up and moving away from him (until, of course, they move back in).

Part of the thrill of guiding children into adulthood is the release. But it's also a parent's greatest act of surrender. Still, you have to let them go. Start now.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Children change you. They really do.

'After 17' is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that's kind of where I'm at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, 'Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,' but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody that has a child.

I wish I could freeze time or go back in time and watch my kids grow up all over again because it is just going by too fast.

I would like to have seen my sons growing up.

Something like a divorce does change you, but children change you more, and now I've had three.

The thing with children is they're a bit like baking a fruitcake: you throw all the ingredients in but you never know how they're going to turn out.

I have 'Parents' magazine in my home.

I am a step mother, so how children deal with divorce is something I've witnessed first hand and thought about a lot.

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.

I'm a great lover of children. I never thought that one day I'd actually be a father, but I'm very pleased that I changed my mind. Children are extremely important. They are the future of the world.

About the time I turned 50, I experienced the profound biological change that often accompanies women at that age. Also, I put two kids in college and lost both of my parents, so I'm no longer somebody's daughter.