Judith Viorst (born February 3, 1931) is an American author, newspaper journalist, and psychoanalysis researcher. She is perhaps best known for her children's literature, such as The Tenth Good Thing About Barney (about the death of a pet) and the Alexander series of short picture books.
Viorst is a 1952 graduate of the Newark College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. In 1968, Viorst signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In the latter part of the 1970s, after two decades of writing for children and adults, she turned to the study of Freudian psychology. In 1981, after six years of study at Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, she became a research graduate there.
Read more about Judith Viorst: Personal Life
Famous quotes by judith viorst:
“Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer...from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love—and its partner, hate. Our father—our ‘second other’Melaborates on them. Offering us an alternative to the mother-baby relationship . . . presenting a masculine model which can supplement and contrast with the feminine. And providing us with further and perhaps quite different meanings of lovable and loving and being loved.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce ‘better’ children than they produced.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Our father presents an optional set of rhythms and responses for us to connect to. As a second home base, he makes it safer to roam. With him as an ally—a love—it is safer, too, to show that we’re mad when we’re mad at our mother. We can hate and not be abandoned, hate and still love.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)