Top 69 Judith Viorst Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.
Judith Viorst
#3. A normal adolescent is so restless and twitchy and awkward that he can mange to injure his knee
not playing soccer, not playing football
but by falling off his chair in the middle of French class.
Judith Viorst
#4. Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational, but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
Judith Viorst
#5. For we lose not only by death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on.
Judith Viorst
#6. Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.
Judith Viorst
#7. Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose.
Judith Viorst
#8. 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
#9. 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.
Judith Viorst
#10. 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.
Judith Viorst
#11. 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.
Judith Viorst
#12. I didn't really notice that he had a funny nose.
And he certainly looked better all dressed up in fancy clothes.
He's not nearly as attractive as he seemed the other night.
So I think I'll just pretend that this glass slipper feels too tight.
Judith Viorst
#13. Eventually we will learn that the loss of indivisible love is another of our necessary losses, that loving extends beyond the mother-child pair, that most of the love we receive in this world is love we will have to share
and that sharing begins at home, with our sibling rivals.
Judith Viorst
#14. Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces, and then eat just one of the pieces.
Judith Viorst
#15. It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image. - Colette
Judith Viorst
#16. Many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adolescent love.
Judith Viorst
#17. Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it.
Judith Viorst
#18. For some it takes a lifetime to find true love, But for the lucky ones a lifetime is merely enough to share the love they've found.
Judith Viorst
#19. 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.
Judith Viorst
#20. No-fault guilt: This is when, instead of trying to figure out who's to blame, everyone pays.
Judith Viorst
#21. Late birds get worms while early birds get tired.
Judith Viorst
#22. Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.
Judith Viorst
#23. It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My mom says some days are like that.
Judith Viorst
#24. It is true love because 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
#25. 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.
Judith Viorst
#26. 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
#27. We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.
Judith Viorst
#28. One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.
Judith Viorst
#29. Mid-grade readers don't have short attention spans, they just have low boredom tolerance.
Judith Viorst
#30. In fact, I would like to propose that central to understanding our lives is understanding how we deal with loss. I would like to propose in this book that the people we are and the lives that we lead are determined, for better and worse, by our loss experiences.
Judith Viorst
#31. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying I love you.
Judith Viorst
#32. 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
#33. There comes a time when we aren't allowed not to know.
Judith Viorst
#34. Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.
Judith Viorst
#35. My mom says I'm her sugarplum.
My mom says I'm her lamb.
My mom says I'm completely perfect
Just the way I am.
My mom says I'm a super-special wonderful terrific little guy.
My mom just had another baby.
Why?
Judith Viorst
#36. Absence makes the heart grow frozen, not fonder.
Judith Viorst
#37. A normal adolescent isn't a normal adolescent
if he acts normal.
Judith Viorst
#38. Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.
Judith Viorst
#39. 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
#40. But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.
Judith Viorst
#41. Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.
Judith Viorst
#42. Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the wine taste richer, the laughter ring louder because they are there.
Judith Viorst
#43. If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty-and frightened too.
Judith Viorst
#44. Strength is the capacity to break a Hershey bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.
Judith Viorst
#45. I could be such a wonderful wife to another wife's husband.
Judith Viorst
#46. I don't intend to stop showing a little cleavage. Nor do I intend to stop flashing a little thigh.
Judith Viorst
#47. [On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.
Judith Viorst
#48. We have to divide mother love with our brothers and sisters. Our parents can help us cope with the loss of our dream of absolute love. But they cannot make us believe that we haven't lost it.
Judith Viorst
#49. If we are the younger, we may envy the older. If we are the older, we may feel that the younger is always being indulged. In otherwords, no matter what position we hold in family order of birth, we can prove beyond a doubt that we're being gypped.
Judith Viorst
#51. Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.
Judith Viorst
#52. I hope the next time you get a double-decker strawberry ice-cream cone the ice cream part falls off the cone and lands in Australia.
Judith Viorst
#53. Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.
Judith Viorst
#54. 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
#55. I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there's gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
Judith Viorst
#56. 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
#57. When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the street, I always hope he's dead.
Judith Viorst
#59. We each are artists of the self, creating a collage -- a new and original work of art -- out of scraps and fragments of identifications. The people with whom we identify are, positively or negatively, always important to us. Our feelings toward them are, in some way, always intense.
Judith Viorst
#60. 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
#61. Recognize joy when it arrives in the plain brown wrappings of everyday life.
Judith Viorst
#62. Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our "second other"-elaborates on them.
Judith Viorst
#63. 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
#64. There is no ache more Deadly than the striving to be oneself. - Yevgeniy Vinokurov
Judith Viorst
#65. Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
Judith Viorst
#66. READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that's tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw.
Judith Viorst
#67. 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
#68. Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.
Judith Viorst
#69. 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.
Judith Viorst
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