Judith Viorst Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.

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.

Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?

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.

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.

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.

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

A normal adolescent isn't a normal adolescent if he acts normal.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Late birds get worms while early birds get tired.

Some days are like that. Even in Australia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I think I'll move to Australia.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

the lives we lead are determined, for better and worse, by our loss experiences.

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.

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.

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.

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

Absence makes the heart grow frozen, not fonder.

Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.

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

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

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