Parenthood Quotes

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.

~ Lionel Shriver

Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

I can speak of our baby like this to no one else. Who but his father would linger over the exact width of his gummy little smile or the blueness of his eyes, or the sweetness of his little lick of tawny hair on his forehead?

~ Philippa Gregory

On first hearing that little voice – as fine and friable, I felt, as cotton thread, the impact on my soul was that of the highest magnitude of earthquake, those that occur every hundred years, say, or every thousand. The old shell I called myself cracked and was swallowed by a sudden crevasse, and just as suddenly was lost in the commotion.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Delirious as it can be, sex is only one kind of intimacy, and yet has become the cultural catchment area for all kinds of needs because our understanding of intimacy is so poor. Brutal work schedules, related geographic isolation, and the concomitant fracturing of families has meant that there is little time for intimacy, and even less to teach the necessary skills. But intimacy, the axis of romance, is slow, based on the sharing of a life rather than show. In terms of intimacy, folding laundry together or sharing the feeding of a child can have more impact than the most extravagant bouquet.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

It's tough being AWESOME all the time, but the kids need someone to look up to!

~ Tanya Masse

We watched each other evolve into parents, with all the fear, rage and confusion evolution can involve. Our eight-year-old is the incarnation of our union; we are forever fused by her blood. My old take on romance seemed vaguely ludicrous, as affected as a pair of spats. I no longer saw the point in 'getting back to normal', that pantomime of pretending nothing had changed; I wanted to evolve from sexual posturing into a deeper consciousness, that of love.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

My handsome husband and I didn’t make love for almost six months. I was enraptured, lost to my old life, and, in this obsession, disregarded author Ayelet Waldman – who famously wrote of her 'smug well-being' and 'always vital, even torrid' sex life in the wake of childbirth: I ignored my husband as a man. Instead, I revelled in him as a different thing altogether, far more seductive and important, and infinitely more resonant. My husband was no longer just a man: he was the father of my child.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Confession: Having kids did not fix me. I was not somehow more whole, less botched-up, or more certain just because I had a kid... I was still me, with all my holes and problems and questions - only now I was also exhuasted and had a lot more laundry to do.

~ Jerusalem Jackson Greer

A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write because that was exactly how it felt.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss of a parent. If he were only in possession of this equipment, he would be just fine. He would be noble and selfless, wise and philosophical. Perhaps he would even have kids of his own, and would presumably possess the kind of maturity that comes with fatherhood, the understanding of life as a process.

~ David Nicholls

Why do men like me want sons? he wondered. It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.

~ John Steinbeck

A Nobel Prize winner was asked how he became a scientist. He said that every day after school, his mother would ask him not what he learned but whether he asked a good question today. That, he said, was how he became a scientist.

~ Thomas L. Friedman

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

~ Jonathan Maas

In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.

~ Anne Lamott

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

~ Roman Payne

Charles Williams loved his son with reservations, complaining that a child is a guest of a somewhat inconsistent temperament, rather difficult to get rid of, almost pushing; a poor relation rather than a pleasant kind.

~ Philip Zaleski

We no longer get work out of our children, today we get meaning.

~ Esther Perel

The doc swore she came out screamin' in the key of E.

~ Dolly Parton

Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you’re-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family’s life when they could reach one another in calm

~ Philip Roth

Parenthood makes such sweet hypocrites of us all.

~ Jess Walter

As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

We have enough money. You don't want to be Uncle Daddy.

~ Jennifer Crystal

The more you care, the more you fear.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

His childhood passed in quiet anxiety.

~ Jen Pollock Michel

Thing about boats is, you can always sell them if you don't like them. Can't sell kids.

~ Lin Pardey

She watched as he settled down on the bed with Naya skin to skin on his chest. His hand all but covered her tiny body as he stroked her in that changeling way, bonding with her on the most elemental level. Then he purred, and Naya made a happy little sound of delight, very much a cat in her love of touch.

~ Nalini Singh

I have that hypocrisy of a parent in that I'm like,'Come on, you've got to toughen up at the same time let me take care of that for you.

~ Craig Ferguson

I believe my mother was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she'd get one-syllable answers.

~ H.w. Brands

Was she insane?! She would lose her head before she was 20!

~ Margaret Landon

it's my responsibility to cultivate the man in my son. I can't be passive about that.

~ Randy Alcorn

Miseries of a birth.

~ Roland Barthes

You are the closest I will ever come to magic.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?

~ Gustave Flaubert

When you moved, I felt squeezed with a wild infatuation and protectiveness. We are one. Nothing, not even death, can change that.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you're making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can't find a towel or a sponge or your inside voice.

~ Kelly Corrigan

She was an alien, really - a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine - and he didn't understand anything about her species.

~ Christopher Moore

If I had to do it all again, I would still want my same daughter and two sons; through laughter, tears, prayers, and blessings.

~ Ana Monnar

After you are here, I will try not to become one of those parents who brag incessantly about their children, who force them to recite the alphabet backward or sing the Lord's Prayer in German to horrified dinner guests. One of those parents who tell people who aren't interested and haven't askd what their progeny's grade-point average is, what school they go to, how handsome and brilliant and psychic they are. If something goes awry and I do become one of those parents, you have my permission to sneak into my bedroom while I am sleeping and pinch my nostrils shut.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.

~ Leif Enger