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
Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.
We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.
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.
The need to become a separate self is as urgent as the yearning to merge forever. And as long as we, not our mother, initiate parting, and as long as our mother remains reliably there, it seems possible to risk, and even to revel in, standing alone.
Control cannot be called conscience until we are able to take it inside us and make it our own, until--in spite of the fact that the wrongs we have done or imagined will never be punished or known--we nonetheless feel that the clutch in the stomach, that chill upon the soul, that self-inflicted misery called guilt.
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.
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.
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.
Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.