The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that children are the ultimate positive outcome of one's past experiences, making it impossible to feel regret.
In this quote, Anna Quindlen reflects on the profound impact that children have on their parents' lives, suggesting that despite any mistakes or regrets in the past, the joys and fulfillment that come from raising children outweigh any negative feelings. The phrase 'finest fruits' symbolizes the positive achievements that emerge from life's journey, emphasizing that children can transform past regrets into cherished blessings.
In practice
In a family reunion speech, you can express gratitude for the joy children bring, using this quote.
The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
There is no word for feeling nostalgic about the future, but that's what a parent's tears often are, a nostalgia for something that has not yet occurred. They are the pain of hope, the helplessness of hope, and finally, the surrender to hope.
I think our family is like a lot of families. We had no vocabulary for mental illness
My mother made countless sacrifices so that her children - and all children - could grow up in a better nation and world.
Family is supposed to be our safe haven. Very often, it's the place where we find the deepest heartache.
My dad wasn't a power hitter, and I didn't think I'd be a power hitter because the person I wanted to be like was him, and he was the one that taught me to play the game.
I think the hardest thing about making music now is being a great dad at the same time. There's an insanity that goes with writing - a mad scientist thing that you have to go through - and sacrificing a kid's upbringing to do that is not an option.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.