Best 69 quotes of Judith Viorst on MyQuotes

Judith Viorst

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    Judith Viorst

    Absence makes the heart grow frozen, not fonder.

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    Judith Viorst

    Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    as we acquire new aches and new pains, our health care is, of necessity, being supplied by internists, cardiologists, dermatologists, podiatrists, urologists, periodontists, gynecologists and psychiatrists, from all of whom we want a second opinion. We want a second opinion that says, don't worry, you are going to live forever.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

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

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    For we lose not only by death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on.

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    Judith Viorst

    Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can't be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and the skills to get what we want within the limitations imposed by reality - a reality which consists of diminished powers, restricted freedoms and, with the people we love, imperfect connections.

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    Judith Viorst

    I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

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    Judith Viorst

    I don't intend to stop showing a little cleavage. Nor do I intend to stop flashing a little thigh.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    I had it together on Sunday. By Monday at noon it had cracked. On Tuesday debris Was descending on me. And by Wednesday no part was intact. On Thursday I picked up some pieces. On Friday I picked up the rest. By Saturday, late, It was almost set straight. And on Sunday the world was impressed With how well I had got it together.

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    Judith Viorst

    I think I'll move to Australia.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    Late birds get worms while early birds get tired.

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    Judith Viorst

    Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.

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    Judith Viorst

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

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    Judith Viorst

    Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.

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    Judith Viorst

    Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

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

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    Judith Viorst

    Mid-grade readers don't have short attention spans, they just have low boredom tolerance.

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    Judith Viorst

    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?

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    Judith Viorst

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

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

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

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    Judith Viorst

    Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.

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    Judith Viorst

    Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our "second other"-elaborates on them.

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    Judith Viorst

    Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    Recognize joy when it arrives in the plain brown wrappings of everyday life.

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    Judith Viorst

    Serious skeptics, true believers, and seekers of every stripe will want to read Mitch Horowitz's vibrant, probing, and richly researched account of the impact of the positive-thinking movement on every aspect of American life today. Filled with a cast of remarkable characters and many lively tales, One Simple Idea is a readable, responsible examination of the limits and possibilities of mind-power as a source of constructive transformation.

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    Judith Viorst

    Some days are like that. Even in Australia.

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    Judith Viorst

    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.

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    Judith Viorst

    Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.