#pare

...[E]ven I know that being a parent is awful ninety-five percent of the time...As far as I can tell, it's that last five percent that keeps the human race from dying out. Four parts blinding terror, one part perfection. It's like mainlining heroin. One taste of life on that edge and you're hooked. ↗

— Kimberly McCreight

#life

...the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy. ↗

— Louisa May Alcott

#love

If one unlabeled bottle holds nonfat milk, what does the second unlabeled bottle contain? If you answered “Whole milk” then you’re obviously not ready to receive a jug of my love. So I’ll just pour it in someone else’s coffee.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#label #labels #love #milk #nonsense

You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had. ↗

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

#compassion #discipline #love #parenting #love

He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#intimacy-self-sacrifice #therapy #transparency #love

It's the curse of motherhood. You're required to love us even when we vex you. ↗

— Julia Quinn

#motherhood #parenting-children #love

Everything I had to give went to my children, and though I loved them and my husband utterly, the drudgery of the day-to-day made it seem as if not love but coffee, my Toyota and sheer logistics were what propelled me through life. ↗

— Marcia DeSanctis

#love

that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime. . . he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note. ↗

— John Burnham Schwartz

#growth #love #parenting #love

A virtue is a habit that includes all of these things: actions (you take care of your child even when you don't feel like it), emotions (you are often overtaken by feelings of tenderness and delight), perceptions (you understand your little children better than they understand themselves), choices (you choose to get out of bed and go to the children's room even when you'd much rather not), and thoughts (you think differently, more thoroughly and carefully, about your children than about anyone else in the world). The habit of love includes all these things, but not necessarily all at the same time. ↗

— Phillip Cary

#love #parenting #virtue #love

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot. ↗

— Hanif Kureishi

#father-daughter #parents #regret #love