Judith Viorst Short Quotes

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A normal adolescent isn't a normal adolescent if he acts normal.

Judith Viorst
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying, 'I love you.'

Judith Viorst
I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Judith Viorst
Many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adolescent love.

Judith Viorst
The lives we lead are determined, for better and worse, by our loss experiences.

Judith Viorst
Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.

Judith Viorst
Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.

Judith Viorst
No-fault guilt: This is when, instead of trying to figure out who's to blame, everyone pays.

Judith Viorst
I don't intend to stop showing a little cleavage. Nor do I intend to stop flashing a little thigh.

Judith Viorst
Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.

Judith Viorst
Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.

Judith Viorst
Still married after all these years?
No mystery.
We are each other's habit,
And each other's history.

Judith Viorst
If his mother was drowning and I was drowning and he had to choose one of us to save, He says he'd save me.

Judith Viorst
Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.

Judith Viorst
Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose.

Judith Viorst
Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational — but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?

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
Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.

Judith Viorst
Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love—and its partner, hate. Our father—our second other —elaborates on them.

Judith Viorst
Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands — and then eat just one of the pieces.

Judith Viorst
Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.

Judith Viorst
Being in love is better than being in jail, a dentist's chair, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia, but not if he doesn't love you back.

Judith Viorst
When he is late for dinner and I know he must be
either having an affair or lying dead in the
middle of the street,
I always hope he's dead.

Judith Viorst
We love as soon as we learn to distinguish a separate 'you' and 'me.' Love is our attempt to assuage the terror and isolation of that separateness.

Judith Viorst
Nobody has to pay me to be nervous.
I've always done it as a volunteer.
I do it as a kind of public service
That draws upon my expertise in fear.

Judith Viorst
With four walk-in closets to walk in,
Three bushes, two shrubs, and one tree,
The suburbs are good for the children,
But no place for grown-ups to be.

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
We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.

Judith Viorst
There is a time to separate from our mother. But unless we are ready to separate-unless we are ready to leave her and be left-anything is better than separation.

Judith Viorst
It's true love because
If he said quit drinking martinis but I kept on drinking them and the next morning I couldn't get out of bed,
He wouldn't tell me he told me.

Judith Viorst