Judith Viorst
Judith Viorst
Judith Viorstis an American writer, newspaper journalist, and psychoanalysis researcher. She is perhaps best known for her children's literature, such as The Tenth Good Thing About Barneyand the Alexander series of short picture books, which includes Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which has sold over two million copies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth3 February 1931
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.
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.
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.
Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on--our lost narcissism lives on--in our ego ideal.
For we lose not only by death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on.
Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.
Our father presents an optional set of rhythms and responses for us to connect to. As a second home base, he makes it safer to roam. With him as an ally--a love--it is safer, too, to show that we're mad when we're mad at our mother. We can hate and not be abandoned, hate and still love.
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.
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.
the lives we lead are determined, for better and worse, by our loss experiences.
Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.
It is true that the present is powerfully shaped by the past. But it is also true that ... insight at any age keeps us from singing the same sad songs again.
For many men the denial of dependency on their mother is repeated in their subsequent relationships, sometimes by an absence of any sexual interest in women, sometimes by a pattern of loving and leaving them.
Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.