Margaret Kennedy Quotes & Sayings

It is better to break one's heart than to do nothing with it. — Margaret Kennedy

Single parents in particular may have trouble maintaining themselves as authority figures because of underlying guilt; they feel acontinuing sense that they have deprived their kids of the second parent, and so they tend to give in to the children's requests, even when unreasonable. — Margaret Kennedy

No matter how children came to be living with just one parent, they need to be told, again and again, that your family's configuration is the result of an adult decision or an act of fate that has nothing whatsoever to do with them. — Margaret Kennedy

Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Boy and girl angst over which family they visit at Thanksgiving and which one in December and whether or not it's best to serve turkey or goose for the family feast. When first faced with the reality that the family you married into does things differently, the warmth of tradition can take on a chill. — Margaret Kennedy

Acquired tastes are the mark of the man of leisure. — Margaret Kennedy

Patience is the capacity to endure all that is necessary in attaining a desired end ... Patience never forsakes the ultimate goal because the road is hard. There can be no patience without an object. — Margaret Kennedy

Our kids are not here to comfort us, to entertain us, or to validate us. Those things need to come from ourselves and from other adults. — Margaret Kennedy

We've all got to remember to pick our battles carefully, to be prepared to lose small ones, and to hold out for big ones. — Margaret Kennedy

Where the bedroom is wrong the whole house is wrong. — Margaret Kennedy

Too-broad questions, such as, "What's on your mind?" are apt to be answered "nothing" nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be careful of slipping into ""psycho-speak," however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you're reading a script from the latest child-psychology text. — Margaret Kennedy

They are emotional gluttons, both of them. They gobbled up every sensation they could extract from marriage, and now they are seeing if separation won't provide them with a few more. — Margaret Kennedy

One of the silliest lines ever said in a feature film came from Love Story, the 1970s hit, which immortalized the phrase, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." There are few people who would actually want to share a life with someone who held that concept near and dear. — Margaret Kennedy

It's no use to worry about what people think. I never do. I used to. But when I saw that they'd really rather think wrong than right I gave it up. — Margaret Kennedy

[Our family is] a wonderfully messy arrangement, in which relationships overlap, underlie, support, and oppose one another. It didn't always come together easily nor does it always stay together easily. It's known very good times and very bad ones. It has held together, often out of shared memories and hopes, sometimes out of the lure of my sisters' cooking, and sometimes out of sheer stubbornness. And like the world itself, our family is renewed by each baby. — Margaret Kennedy

Having renounced his native land, Sanger adopted no other. He roved about from one European capital to another, never settling anywhere for long, driven forwards by his strange, restless fancy. Usually he quartered himself upon his friends, who were accustomed to endure a great deal from him. He would stay with them for weeks, composing third acts in their spare bedrooms, producing operas which always failed financially, falling in love with their wives, conducting their symphonies, and borrowing money from hem. His preposterous family generally accompanied him. Few people could recollect quite how many children Sanger was supposed to have got, but there always seemed to be a good many and they were most shockingly brought up. — Margaret Kennedy

Parents, whether or not we believe in a deity, know that to witness a child's mind searching for meaning is a miracle. — Margaret Kennedy