Quotes About Responsibility

When I kept someone else from getting hurt, did I hurt you?

I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it's not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all.

What twisted deity would grant you the superpower of fatherhood to protect someone who, one day, would not need you?

Your mama finds you like that, she's going to pitch a fit. The only way she'd find out is if you told her I'd come out here with you, and then she'd be too angry at you to yell at me. Guess we're partners in crime, then.

Ms. Cormier, who has the right to judge someone else? Well, she said. That depends on whether you're judging in a moral sense or a legal sense. Morally, no one has the right to judge anyone else. But legally, its not a right-it's a responsibility.

The best thing is what you think should be done. The rightest thing is what needs to be done-when you think not just of you and how you feel, but also the extra stuff-who else is involved, and what's happened before, and what the rules say.

when you loved someone, you didn't want to be the one who brought their world crashing down.

could not be blamed just because no one ever mentioned that once you closed the storybook, Cinderella still had to do laundry and clean the toilet and take care of the crown prince.

Since when does anyone get the option to do what's easiest?

I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people have children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.

Could you love someone so much that, even without meaning to, you hurt them?

You can't buy a clean conscience.

No matter what you do for someone-no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he's not hungry-make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable.

Parenthood was like awakening to find a soap bubble in the cup of your palm, and being told you had to carry it while you parachuted from a dizzying height, climbed a mountain range, battled on the front lines. All you wanted to do was tuck it away, safe from natural disasters and violence and prejudice and sarcasm, but that was not an option. You lived in daily fear of watching it burst, of breaking it yourself. Somehow

I release Josef, who collapses to my feet, and confesses not just to all war crimes at Auschwitz but also for being responsible for the colossal mistakes New Coke and Sex and the City 2.

Then again, it didn't take me long in the world of corporate law to realize that truth is an afterthought in court. In fact, truth is an afterthought in most trials. But there were six million people who were lied to, during World War II, and somebody owes them the truth.

Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

But kids don't stay where they're supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but hiding in a closet; you turn around and see she's not three but thirteen. Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

An apology with a defense built in isn't much of an apology

Then you're the one. Allie blinked at him. The one what? The one who loves more. ... You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone always puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

Do you owe someone only the care they provided for you? Or does believing that make you as culpable as they were?

You could lose track of someone when you blinked, Alex realized. She vowed not to let that happen to her and her daughter. Because when it came down to it, being a judge didn't matter nearly as much as being a mother. When Alex's clerk had told her the news about the World Trade Center, her first thought had not been for her constituents . . . only for Josie.

history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn't someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning? If not me, then who?

If you ask me who Ruth Jefferson was a month ago, I would have said she's a good nurse, and she's a good mother. But now I have people telling me I wasn't a good nurse. And if I can't put a casserole on the table and cloth on your back, then I have to second guess myself as a mother too. If you don't let me do this, if you don't let me take care of you, then I don't know who i'm suppose to be anymore.