“I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given. Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.”
Quote by Marian Wright Edelman
Work
Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing Up in America – Intimate Essays on Diverse Childhoods
Browse quotes and source details for this work. more
Author
You May Also Like
Source: Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
Source: A Woman of No Importance
“Les enfants sont des créatures extraordinaires, quand ils ne sont pas simplement chiants.”
Source: A Deepness in the Sky
Source: Veiled Seduction
Source: Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
Source: God Is in the Pancakes
Source: The Adventures of Meow Smith and The Day That Froze
Source: Big Voice Within
