Quotes About Responsibility

When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the blessing aspect. We omit the instant of sudden chill, the what-if, the free fall into certain failure. What if I fail to take care of this baby? What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me? And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby?

When my mother was near death at age ninety she told me that she was ready to die but could not. "You and Jim need me," she said. My brother and I were by then in our sixties.

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only

Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations.

That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

There were, early on, certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well handled by the press.

I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.

Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.

So she told me she was pregnant, it was an accident, and she wanted to know what to do and I went into the ladies' room because I knew I was going to cry and I didn't want to cry in front of her and I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly and then I heard the bomb and when I finally got out part of her was in the sherbet and part of her was in the street and you, you son of a bitch, you want someone to remember her.

What these men represented was not "the West" but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities precisely because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.

Nonetheless, character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

One of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.

This is in fact the kind of story we expect to hear about our elected officials. We not only expect them to use other nations as changeable scrims in the theater of domestic politics but encourage them to do so.

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?

People who respect themselves...are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds. That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

Whoever had invented long division has a lot to answer for.

It's easy to blame someone else for our failings...

One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.

I get so sick of people asking me, "Do you work?" Of course I work! I've got five children under ten—I work twenty four hours a day! But of course they mean, "Do you work for pay, outside your home?" Sometimes I hear myself say, "No, I don't work," and I think, "That's a complete lie!

A barren woman was always tragic, she thought despairingly, but at least her tragedy belonged to herself and her husband alone. When a queen was barren, the tragedy belonged to a nation.

when it's your own child, you are not a babysitter. It's called parenting.

Parents don't get to call in and take a day off. As always, the sight of her filled me with such an unbearable ache of love that it nearly knocked me to my knees. How could one small person have become my entire existence? I couldn't even imagine life without her. She was the sum total of my reason for living. Picking

Friends come and go. Employees move on. Your partner is there beside you for the long haul. He deserves your best every day of your life.

Watch: (1) You do something nasty to me. (2) I hate you. (3) You find it uncomfortable to be hated. (4) You think how nice it would be if I didn't hate you. (5) You decide I ought not to hate you because hate is bad. (6) Good people don't hate. (7) Because I hate you I am a bad person. (8) It is not what you did to me that makes me hate you, it is my own bad nature. I—not you—am the cause of my hating you.