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"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."
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"There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal."
"When you discipline a child you prepare them for a responsible and accountable adulthood."
"Motherhood isn't just about making babies, it's about making lives and molding destinies."
"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."
"Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived."
"What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind - a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia - and who hands back each of these when its needed?"
"Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."
"The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it."
"Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man."
"Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself."
"To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given."
"Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey."
"What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd."
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