Quotes About Responsibility

Since then, I've subjected my impulses to leave for work to a three-step protocol: 1) Is it necessary that I go at this moment? 2) Is there something at home that I want to avoid? 3) Will I be letting anyone down by leaving right now?

He didn't like kids, and parents of kids weren't high on his list, either. It didn't matter how cool you'd been--you had a kid and you were one more sucker spooning goop into an angry little mouth, a guy with pacifiers in his pockets and snot trails on his sleeves and a happy-goofy look Danny could only think was some kind of shock, like those people who sit around cracking jokes after their legs get blown off.

Years ago, when Sasha and I were struggling with Lincoln, my habit of "fleeing" to my clinic almost cost me my marriage. Since then, I've subjected my impulses to leave for work to a three-step protocol: 1) Is it necessary that I go at this moment? 2) Is there something at home that I want to avoid? 3) Will I be letting anyone down by leaving right now?

It's a pity we're forced to make the choices that govern the whole of our lives when we're so goddamn young.

Say, I'd like to speak with your pa this afternoon, if he's a minute to spare." "You know where to look." "Why don't I stop by around three." This plan, so casually made that it hardly qualified as an appointment, could not have been more ironclad had it been typed into an executive diary by a secretarial school graduate fluent in stenography

It's a pity we're forced to make the choices that govern the whole of our lives when we're so goddamn young." "If they're the wrong choices, then we have to make new ones," Dexter said. "Even late in the day.

If you ever find yourself thinking that a mass human extinction event would be good for population control, you might want to get checked out.

Is it? I thought. Is it really better if I talk about it? Isn't keeping this hidden the only way I can protect you, can protect this family? Isn't that my job, taking care of us? Sometimes you can do that better with silence than with words.

The problem is - we own our lives, sure. But our lives don't belong only to us. And yet, we are here to tell our stories in this way to make sense of our lives. So how do you tell a story when you know that telling it will bring other people sorrow? Is it better, in the end, to just be silent?

We all have a responsibility to volunteer somewhere and I'm lucky that I get the education and get taken to places to see what's out there and see what's happening and to then be a part of it in hopefully an impactful way.

My mother is a big believer in being responsible for your own happiness. She always talked about finding joy in small moments and insisted that we stop and take in the beauty of an ordinary day. When I stop the car to make my kids really see a sunset, I hear my mother's voice and smile.

I'm privileged, because I have a lot of freedom. I want to use it to make as warm and normal a life as I can for our daughters.

America is an idea. And it's the solemn responsibility of each 'temporary' president to protect and nurture that noblest of all ideas - with integrity. This man, Mitt Romney, has shown - not through his experience, but through his actions and words - that he is unqualified to carry out that responsibility.

A pregnancy tore up our lives. It's going to tear up hers. There's no hiding from that. A pregnancy's one of those things that doesn't hide well. It's kind of like trying to ignore an elephant in the living room.

In fact, her whole life, she'd done her absolute best to do the right thing. It was wonderful to be wildly, romantically in love at sixteen. But life wasn't romantic

Watching, I dread my own womanhood, the day when I too will follow along carrying bags of groceries, my mission wherever I go to feed other people who take actual part in life while I am simply the catering staff.

He could have cured cancer by now, if he'd never gotten high.

Drug addiction and alcoholism, depression and anxiety, accidental pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. These conditions are believed to share a common etiology, the failure of virtue. Whatever their diagnosis, all Wellways patients have this in common: their troubles are seen to be, in part or in full, their own goddam fault.

A fetus had no thoughts or memories; it had made nothing, understood nothing. And yet, this mute, unthinking knot of tissue—alive, yes, but unformed, unconscious, incapable of tenderness or reasoning or even laughter—was the life that mattered. The woman carrying it, the complex creature formed by twenty or thirty years of living in the world, was simply the means of production. Her feelings about the matter, her particular ideas and needs and desires, didn't matter at all.

My people are crumbling and dying and starving, and you're blessing blessed people and serving the saved.

If people around me aren't moved by my Christ or my church, then I must be doing a miserable job of representing them both.

You better have had a baby, killed someone, or slept with a pure. Those are your three options. Anything less is unsuitable.

Everyone things children are sweet as Necco Wafers, but I've lived long enough to know the truth: kids are rotten. The only difference between grown-ups and kids is that grown-ups go to jail for murder. Kids get away with it.

Like me!" I said. "I have to work hard, too. Why, I haven't thrown manure in over two months!