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"No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move."
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Exlpore more Parenting quotes
"There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal."
"Our greatest duty to our children is to love them first. Secondly, it is to teach them. Not to frighten, force, or intimidate our children into submission, but to effectively teach them so that they have the knowledge and tools to govern themselves."
"When you discipline a child you prepare them for a responsible and accountable adulthood."
"A parents wishes for their children shouldn't be to be as good as them but to surpass their own abilities and hopefully lead to a better world."
"Motherhood isn't just about making babies, it's about making lives and molding destinies."
"I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't."
"When my son Nick was five years old, he was sitting at the kitchen bar while I prepared dinner. In typical busy mother fashion, I was multitasking-cooking, cleaning, running the laundry, answering the phone, and attempting to listen to what he had to say."
"If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away."
"We pretend that we know our children, because it's easier than admitting the truth--from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers. It's far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it's safer to say you're a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you."
Explore more quotes by John Irving
"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin."
"You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one."
"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."
"To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense."
"I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story."
"Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is."
"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
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