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
Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.
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.
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.
Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer...from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger.
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.
Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational -- but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
Strength is the ability to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of those pieces.
One advantage of marriage, it seems to me, is that when you fall out of love with him, or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you maybe fall in again.
You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.
Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.
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.
Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.
We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.
I could be such a wonderful wife to another wife's husband.