Quotes & Sayings About Foster Care

In a given year, 640,000 children, most of them poor, will spend at least some time in foster care. — J.D. Vance

If you have the choice of being abused by your mother or abused by a stranger, you'd choose your mother. It's abuse either way." This came from Arelis Rosario-Keane, a twenty-two-year-old college student and a veteran of the foster care system, referring to the likelihood of getting mistreated in care. — Cris Beam

Actually I grew up in foster care too," admitted James. — Beyonce White

While spay neuter is important, our goal has never been no more births, even though reducing birth rates might help. Our goal has been and is, and has always been no more killing. And when you focus on the no more killing part, spay neuter actually takes a backseat to all those other programs like foster care, and adoptions, and helping people overcome the challenges they face that cause them to surrender their animals. — Nathan Winograd

Weeks turned into months and a year passed, but I didn't miss my parents. I missed the memory of them. I assumed that part of my life was over. I didn't understand that I was required to have an attachment to them, to these people I barely knew. Rather, it was my understanding that I was supposed to switch my attachment to my foster parents. So I acted on that notion and no one corrected me, so I assumed that what I was doing was good and healthy. — John William Tuohy

Every November on National Adoption Day, courts set aside time to finalize adoptions from foster care that might otherwise be delayed for months, and communities celebrate adoption with retreats, proclamations, and other events. National Adoption Day was started in 2000 and has grown each year. In 2004, courts and community organizations finalized the adoptions of more than 3,400 children from foster care as part of 200 National Adoption Day events in 37 states. — Natalie Nichols Gillespie

It is too late in the century for women who have received the benefits of co-education in schools and colleges, and who bear theirfull share in the world's work, not to care who make the laws, who expound and who administer them. — Judith Ellen Foster

I am a struggling writer. A middle-aged man with two little kids and I'm just trying to earn a living. So buy this book - or my kids will have to go to foster care. — Christopher Darden

The love of a foster mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational. — Winston S. Churchill

Father, I can't take this," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because you're a priest, Father."
"And my money's no good because of it? What are you? A member of the Masonic Lodge?"
"Naw, Father," I said. "I just feel guilty taking money from you."
"Well, you're Irish and Jewish. You have to feel guilty over somethin', don't ya? Take the money and be happy ye have it. — John William Tuohy

Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod. — David Foster Wallace

Then there are all of those children, the ones who aren't resilient. The ones who slowly, quietly die. I think the difference is that the kids who bounce back learn to bear a little bit more than they thought they could, and they soon understand that the secret to surviving foster care is to accept finite disappointments while never losing infinite hope. I think that was how Donald survived as long as he did, by never losing his faith in the wish that tomorrow would be better. But as time went by, day after day, the tomorrows never got better; they got worse, and he simply gave up. In the way he saw the world, pain was inevitable, but no one ever explained to him that suffering was optional. — John William Tuohy

I don't spend money on shoes. I don't spend money on my hair. I don't spend money on really anything except for my skin. I am obsessed with skin, and I have been taking care of it since I was 19. — Sara Foster

The charity work is just a part of what I do. Like ... I make time to clean my house, to care for my pets, to visit my extended family, because those things are important to me. Same with helping others. — Lori Foster

I've worked with homeless kids, kids in foster care, and I've never met a kid who couldn't be reached. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

This is for the kids who know that the worst kind of fear isn't the thing that makes you scream, but the one that steals your voice and keeps you silent. — Abby Norman

We must not allow this generation to produce record numbers for the juvenile justice, runaway and homeless youth, or foster care systems. — Ruben Hinojosa

Otherwise, there were no long goodbyes or emotional scenes. That isn't part of foster care. You just leave and you just die a little bit. Just a little bit because a little bit more of you understands that this is the way it's going to be. And you grow hard around the edges, just a little bit. Not in some big way, but just a little bit because you have to, because if you don't it only hurts worse the next time and a little bit more of you will die. And you don't want that because you know that if enough little bits of you die enough times, a part of you leaves. Do you know what I mean? You're still there, but a part of you leaves until you stand on the sidelines of life, simply watching, like a ghost that everyone can see and no one is bothered by. You become the saddest thing there is: a child of God who has given up. — John William Tuohy

Many children in the foster care system are often in the midst of a family challenge. — Michele Bachmann

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is. — Zadie Smith

But now I really don't want to work unless I really, really care about a project. — Jodie Foster

When two people - regardless of gender - long to care for each other, to protect each other, to treasure each other, we should do everything we can to foster that. — Mandy Moore

More broadly, we are going to have to examine the safety net programs to make sure they are poised to catch the families before they fall even more, especially in the areas of unemployment benefits, child care assistance, and foster care. — Richard Neal

Having taken on the care of foster children, a mother forced her own daughter to beat them. According to her later account: Mom puts the fly swatter in my hand and shows me how to do it: grab their wrists, and whack the plastic handle over their pink baby palms. She stands in the doorway of their room until I can crack hard enough to make them scream. — Julie Gregory

Sister, why do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Cage the animals at night?"
"Well ... " She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them."
"But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?"
"Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together. — Jennings Michael Burch

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care - with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. — David Foster Wallace

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again — Thomas C. Foster

He was quiet for a few seconds, and Sophie thought he was going to ignore her. But then he leaned closer-close enough that she could feel his breath on her cheek. I crack a lot of jokes ,Sophie , but ... that's just because it's easier, you know? It's how I deal. But that doesn't mean I don't care. I do, a lot. — Shannon Messenger

You are mine for a moment, but you are His, forever His. — Matt Hammitt

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.
That it is permissible to want.
That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.
That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.
That God - unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both - speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.
That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you. — David Foster Wallace

There's nothing more important in this world than caring for a child. — Seth Adam Smith

Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. — David Foster Wallace

If you're subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough - like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let's say - it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is really a salesman and really ultimately doesn't give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself. — David Foster Wallace

What if our foster care systems, in every one of our communities, knew that the churches are the first place willing to help families and children in crisis? — Russell D. Moore

Denny thought our parents needed a combination of material goods and temperamental changes before he could return home.
"If Dad buys Ma a car, then she'll love him, and they'll get back together and she won't be all crazy anymore," he said. For years he held out the possibility that those things would happen and all would change. "If we had more things, like stoves and cars," he told me at night in our bedroom, "and Ma wasn't like she is, we could go home. — John William Tuohy

Happiness is about being proud of who you are. Be a good friend, be a good daughter, be reliable, be willing to laugh when things get tough, compliment other girls, care about your job, believe in yourself, be vulnerable, tell the truth, apologize when needed, forgive people ... — Erin Foster

The most violent and troubling stories become part of our national consciousness about foster care. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

They projected an illusion of warmth with their home-cooking and hand-stitched quilts, yet underneath the facade was an institutional rigidity, as if they were running an orphanage where children would be fed and cared for but never loved. Love was such a key ingredient in molding humans, yet it was inaccessible to kids inside of the system. — Renee Carlino

We have the opportunity to pour into them what they were created to be; and pullout the treasure that they cannot yet see. — Momma Moon

I prayed for you. Did you know that? Of course not. I've prayed for him to have someone like you since before we left foster care. Maybe it was a selfish prayer. I didn't want to have to worry about Blake out here. And now you are here - an answer to prayer - and I resent you, he said. His eyes held an ominous contempt that eerily reminded Livia of Eve the RoboBlonde. — Debra Anastasia

Back in Australia, I did foster care for sick cats for years, and I was always most successful with the animals when I was given two - a brother and sister. — Jason Gann

If every Christian family brought in a child who needed a family we would put the foster care system out of business. — Shane Claiborne

You may not personally remember Vietnam or Watergate, but it's a good bet you remember "No new taxes" and "Out of the loop" and "No direct knowledge of any impropriety at this time" and "Did not inhale" and "Did not have sex with that Ms. Lewinsky" and etc. etc. It's painful to believe that the would-be "public servants" you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt? — David Foster Wallace

In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. — David Foster Wallace

I think that the hardest thing about working with young people in foster care who've been through this kind of neglect and abuse is really to convince them that they are worthy of being loved. And I think because often they don't feel worthy of it, that's why they push people away. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

And when you graduate and get a job and find the one woman who finally stays - who you want to stay - she won't care that there's not a chance in hell you'll ever figure her out. — Melissa Foster

It's okay not to love us. " I kept my face buried in my pillow, yet my ears were on full alert. "And I'm not going to say that I love you, because I haven't known you long enough to feel that way. I like you very much and I want you to be my daughter forever, but love is something that grows with shared experiences. I feel the buds of love growing, but it hasn't blossomed yet." I could not believe she was being so honest. She took a long breath. "There is nothing we can say to make you believe we'll be here for you. You'll only learn it by living with us year after year. — Ashley Rhodes-Courter

It's painful to believe that the would-be 'public servants' you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. — David Foster Wallace

A father is not to act harshly in word or deed toward his children, goad them to frustration and anger, discourage or demean them, neglect them, or harm them in any way. He is instead to be a blessing from the Lord to his children by taking responsibility to raise them rather than leaving it to the mother and various institutions, such as schools, churches, foster care systems, adoption agencies, and prisons. In short, fathers are supposed to be Pastor Dad, actively involved in the development of every aspect of their children's growth with love, humility, and wisdom. — Mark Driscoll

What in the world are we going to do with you?' Mrs. Ritter asked.
I could think of a few things.
Take it easy on me.
Teach me different.
Care about me just a little.
So many times that year I wanted to shout,'It's not like I'm waking up in the morning and trying to mess up. I just don't get it! — Joan Bauer

Conditions that make us feel anonymous, when we think that others do not know us or care to, can foster antisocial, self-interested behaviors. My — Philip G. Zimbardo

The punter never made her feel quite so taken care of, never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn't know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind. — David Foster Wallace

The heart doesn't care about bloodlines or birth parents. It just seems to know how to love in the same way our lungs know how to breathe. — Melissa Foster

I've noticed that, while I can't help but respect and sort of envy the moral nerve of people who truly do not care what others think of them, people like this also make me nervous, and I tend to do my admiring from a safe distance. — David Foster

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn't enough money to take care of the most basic of needs. — Wayne Dyer

Enforced maternity brings into the world wretched infants, whom their parents will be unable to support and who will become the victims of public care or 'child martyrs'. It must be pointed out that our society, so concerned to defend the rights of the embryo, shows no interest in the children once they are born; it prosecutes the abortionists instead of undertaking to reform that scandalous institution known as 'public assistance'; those responsible for entrusting the children to their torturers are allowed to go free; society closes its eyes to the frightful tyranny of brutes in children's asylums and private foster homes. — Simone De Beauvoir

There are so many crises in foster care - the original abuse, the shock and alarm when a child is removed, the courtroom fights, kids rebelling, bio parents panicking, foster parents molesting, relapses, rehabs, reabuse - that basic, low-level functioning begins to seem exemplary. These are the mediocre flatlands of child welfare, where if it's not a crisis it's not a problem. — Cris Beam

Frigga was the queen of the gods, and she helped her husband, Odin, govern the world. It was her part to look after the children, and help the mothers take care of their families. — Mary H. Foster

Losing your family ... .it puts fear in a different perspective," he said. "Besides, I got by all right. I stayed on the fringe around Chicago, hoped around tent cities and Red Cross camps. Worked for some people who didn't ask questions. Avoided case-workers and foster care. And thought about you."
"Me?" I huffed, completely unsettled. In awe at how vanilla my life seemed. In awe of what he'd endured, He turned then, meeting my eyes for the first time. When he spoke, his voice was gentle, and unashamed.
"You. The only thing in my life that doesn't change. When everything went to hell, you were all I had. — Kristen Simmons

I always studied because I knew I had to. I needed to survive and take care of my mother. — Maria Das Gracas Silva Foster

Still, Allen and the Greens are an example of foster care working exactly as it should: a foster home is meant to be only a temporary holding place while parents get the support they need to get back to being parents again. The foster family should provide the kind of bonding and love that the Greens gave Allen and then, wrenching as it is, let the child go. The biological parents may be imperfect - they may feed the kids inappropriate foods or leave the TV on too long - but as long as there's no abuse, a child belongs with his blood. — Cris Beam

it. I didn't expect Stacks to come for me as hard as he did and because I underestimated him, my baby mama and sister were both dead, and my son was in foster care. — Lucinda John

I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I've thought of him like that often since, as if he's still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return. — China Mieville

Sure, she was going to turn eighteen in less than a year. She'd been in the system long enough to know that eighteenth birthdays weren't marked by celebrations. When the checks stopped coming, she'd be on her own. "Aging out" of foster care meant becoming homeless. She'd heard stories of kids ending up in jail and hospital emergency rooms, selling drugs, living on welfare and food stamps. How desperate did a person have to become before they broke the law to survive? For now, things were good, and she didn't want to mess that up. — Ellen Marie Wiseman

As I presided over Massie's execution, I thought about the abuse and neglect he endured as a child in the foster care system. We failed to keep him safe, and our failure contributed to who he was as an adult. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to kill him, what if we spent that money on other foster children so that we stop producing men like Massie in the first place? — Jeanne Woodford

While large, impersonal orphanages provided children with minimal care and attention from an ever-changing series of nurses, children in loving foster families had available to them surrogate caregivers with whom they readily formed attachments. Children in foster care also demonstrated significantly less distress about the separation from their mothers, and they overcame their distress more readily when reunited with their own families. Therefore, it is not separation per se that is so devastating, but rather the extended stay in a strange, bleak or socially insensitive environment with little or no contact with the mother or other familiar figures. — Patricia K. Kerig

I felt empty a lot and I sometimes had a sense - and I know this sounds strange - that I really had no existence as my own person, that I could disappear and no one would notice or remember that I had ever existed. It is a terrifying thing to live with. I kept myself busy to avoid that feeling, because somehow being busy made me feel less empty. — John William Tuohy

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. — David Foster Wallace

The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independance we must first invite dependance; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness. — Gordon Neufeld

Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate-what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even. — David Foster Wallace

Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without. — David Foster Wallace

This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood--that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump. — David Foster Wallace

The most important element of the foster care system is getting kids out of foster care and into a permanent placement so they don't have to spend their entire childhoods in courtrooms, wondering if they will ever have a place to call home. — Rhea Perlman

I saw the bruises, the burns, the cuts - I knew which ones had been done to you by someone you thought you could trust. Someone you thought loved you. I knew which ones you gave yourself. — Abby Norman

The father of Ruth van Cleve's child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license. — David Foster Wallace

Everyone picked on me in school because I was in foster care. — Dave Pelzer

As a child psychiatrist, I knew too much about the statistics of foster care - less than one percent graduate college with a bachelor's degree, more than fifty percent of foster kids end up homeless after reaching eighteen, and most are dead by twenty-six. — Penny Reid

There are many children who need help, and anyone who wants to reach out and adopt a child from foster care or from a Russian orphanage should reach out and do it. — Melissa Fay Greene

In 1975, stay-at-home mothers spent an average of about eleven hours per week on primary child care (defined as routine caregiving and activities that foster a child's well-being, such as reading and fully focused play). Mothers employed outside the home in 1975 spent six hours doing these activities. Today, stay-at-home mothers spend about seventeen hours per week on primary child care, on average, while mothers who work outside the home spend about eleven hours. This means that an employed mother today spends about the same amount of time on primary child care activities as a nonemployed mother did in 1975. — Sheryl Sandberg

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible threat.....The counselor couldn't prove otherwise. — Noorilhuda

Although Hollywood commonly portrays children in foster care as toddlers clutching teddy bears, nearly one-half are eleven or older. And about one-fifth - 103,500 - are sixteen or older. — Martha Shirk

I don't know'," he said. "Those three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage." And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer.
I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author's craftsmanship. — John William Tuohy

What the hell is that?" he asked.
"Magic mushrooms."
"I've always wanted to try those," he exclaimed. "They sound so cute. — Heather O'Neill

Children born to teens have less supportive and stimulating environments, poorer health, lower cognitive development, and worse educational outcomes. Children of teen mothers are at increased risk of being in foster care and becoming teen parents themselves, thereby repeating the cycle. — Jane Fonda

But very often in politics we have the experience called up from my father when someone was trying to help him in the campaign: I can take care of my enemies, may the Good Lord save me from my friends. — Robert Foster Bennett

At Camellia Network, we believe if we can create a way of identifying every young person aging out of foster care, defining what they need, and giving a community of supporters a simple and clear way to fulfill those needs, we can produce radically improved outcomes for youth. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

That so many thousands of children around the world are available for adoption is a sign of our impoverished humanity. That so many persons around the world open their hearts and homes each year to embrace a few of these children is a lasting testimony to humanity's enduring nobility. — Deborah A. Beasley

It didn't last long. Not many good things in a foster kid's life last long. One day, Maura was gone. Her few things were packed in paper bags and a tearful Miss Louisa carried her out to Miss Hanrahan's black state-owned Ford sedan with the state emblem on the door, and she was gone. The state had found a foster home that would take a little girl but couldn't take the rest of us. There were no long goodbyes. She was just gone. I remember having an enormous sense of helplessness when they took her. Maura didn't know where she were going or long she would be there. She was just gone — John William Tuohy

I don't believe some teachers consider whether their classroom instruction fosters the development of reading habits in their students. Reflecting on the landslide of crossword puzzles, dioramas, annotations, and reading logs assigned to their students for every book they read, teachers might realize that instead of encouraging students to read, these mindless assignments make kids hate reading. Primarily assigned to generate grades and give teachers a false sense that they are holding students accountable for reading, these counterfeit activities - that no wild reader completes on his or her own - guarantee that their students will avoid reading. If we care about our students' reading lives, we must foster their lifelong reading habits and eliminate or reduce the negative influences of classroom practices that don't align with what wild readers do. — Donalyn Miller

Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.
who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good
approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case. — David Foster Wallace

AN INVITATION I don't want to hear what you believe I'm not at all interested in your certainty I couldn't care less about your unexcelled perfection Share with me your doubts Open up your tender heart Let me in to your struggles I'll meet you in that place Where your spiritual conclusions Are starting to crack open That's where the creativity lies That's where the newness shines That's where we can truly meet: Beyond the image Your imperfections Are so perfect In this light I don't want you to be perfect I want you to be real — Jeff Foster

I do not have a family, per se. When I was younger, I grew up in foster care with my brother and sister. It was really a struggle, and knowing that there were people out there with tight-knit families really made my childhood an unfortunate one. — Victor Ortiz

We all make mistakes, and we all need second chances. For youth in foster care, these mistakes are often purposeful - if not consciously so; a way to test the strength of a bond and establish trust in a new parent. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

I founded Camellia Network with my dear friend Isis Dallis Keigwin. The mission of our organization is to create a national network that connects every youth aging out of foster care to the critical resources, opportunities, and support they need to thrive in adulthood. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Growing up, we didn't have anything. My mum wasn't well, so I was in three care homes then foster homes before me and my little brother went back to her. I was passed from pillar to post. — Rebecca Ferguson

Gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is ... True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care
with no one there to see or cheer. — David Foster Wallace

I don't think I'll do foster care or adopt, to be quite honest. — Mary J. Blige

What makes a family is neither the absence of tragedy nor the ability to hide from misfortune, but the courage to overcome it and, from that broken past, write a new beginning. — Steve Pemberton

Writing has always been an interest of mine, and 'The Language of Flowers' combined my experience with foster care with something I've always wanted to do. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh