Judith Viorst - Life Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

View all Judith Viorst Quotes
Friends broaden our horizons. They serve as new models with whom we can identify. They allow us to be ourselves-and accept us that way. They enhance our self-esteem because they think we're okay, because we matter to them. And because they matter to us-for various reasons, at various levels of intensity-they enrich the quality of our emotional life.

Judith Viorst
I think I could do the middle fifties just fine,
Like that actress who, when asked how she could be fifty-four when her son was forty-eight,
Replied, 'My son lives his life, and I live mine.'

Judith Viorst
Not listening is probably the commonest unkindness of married life, and one that creates — more devastatingly than an eternity of forgotten birthdays and misguided Christmas gifts — an atmosphere of not loving and not caring.

Judith Viorst
We begin life with loss. We are cast from the womb without an apartment, a charge plate, a job or a car. We are sucking, sobbing, clinging, helpless babies.

Judith Viorst
Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone--childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

Judith Viorst
We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information... strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the... inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.

Judith Viorst
There is a time in our life when we need to strut our stuff and groove on grandiosity, when we need to be viewed as remarkable and rare, when we need to exhibit ourself in front of a mirror that reflects our self-admiration, when we need a parent to function as that mirror.

Judith Viorst
Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.

Judith Viorst