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

Categorized in : Inspirational Food Strength

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.

leaving mother men

No-fault guilt: This is when, instead of trying to figure out who... by Judith Viorst

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

guilt trying pay

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.

mother father children

many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adol... by Judith Viorst

many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adolescent love.

adolescence done

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

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

soul love-you may

I could be such a wonderful wife to another wife's husband. by Judith Viorst

I could be such a wonderful wife to another wife's husband.

wife husband wonderful

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

parent believe children

We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.

infancy self-love self

Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.

dancing hair children

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.

separation ready mother

Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can... by Judith Viorst

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

neurosis golden growing-up

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.

age faces children

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 Barbra Streisand Were trying to do something about it.

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 love again.

All along, I've been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.

understand me perfect window

Everyone has bad days, and when you're having a bad day, you think, 'Here I am being singled out by a hostile, malicious universe that is picking exclusively on me.' And then you read a book about bad days and realize they happen to everyone, not just tormented, persecuted you.

i-am day me you

If I could pick one reason why I want to be a writer, it would be connection. In all kinds of ways, I like to be individual and distinct; but when I write, I want to be writing about things that connect me to the people for whom I write.

me want writing people

Kids are always writing me: 'I had a bad day too.' 'I got gum in my hair.' And the kids also write to me to pass on advice to Alexander. My favorite one of those being, 'The next time you have a bad day, blame your brothers.' I didn't expect this. It's certainly the most successful of my books.

day me you time

Most of the characters I have in my children's books are grouchy or annoyed about something or are calling each other unfriendly names. Like my own kids, they're not honeys and sweetie pies and little angels. They're kids. Sloppy, dirty, stinky.

angels own my-own children

I thought that the 40s was a tough decade, because it's when you finally figure out that you're not immortal, when you really start seeing that certain options are closed to you forever: You're not going to be a brain surgeon; you're not going to be a ballerina.

thought you tough brain