#rents

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#mother #motherhood #parents #pregnancy #life

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

#parents #life

I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison. ↗

— Jhumoa Lahiri

#comparison #get #i #inevitable #interested

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed. ↗

— Jhumoa Lahiri

#building #entailed #growing #growing up #had

At a moderate calculation, among a million of persons inhabiting the metropolis, there are, at least, twenty-five thousand children who attend these schools, and cost their parents as many pounds sterling, per annum. ↗

— Joseph Lancaster

#attend #calculation #children #cost #inhabiting

Talking with other parents really gave me some lessons that I try to hold on to now, as a parent of two boys. ↗

— Joe Lando

#hold #i #lessons #me #now

Until he announced his immigration policy last week, Obama had the support of most Hispanic voters - but not the enthusiasm they had shown for him in 2008. That may be changing in part because of the decision not to deport young immigrants whose undocumented parents brought them here as children. ↗

— Mara Liasson

#because #brought #changing #children #decision

Growing up, mostly in Montreal, I was an only child of loving parents. ↗

— Rudolph A. Marcus

#growing #growing up #i #loving #loving parents

When you're the youngest and the only boy, you get spoilt but you get told you're spoilt so you don't get to enjoy it very much. I was the only man in the house because my parents divorced and my dad moved away when I was 13. ↗

— Eddie Marsan

#because #boy #dad #divorced #enjoy

It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself. ↗

— Joyce Maynard

#grow #i #i can #lives #much