Quotes by Pediatricians

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
Benjamin Spock
Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
Benjamin Spock
It is very difficult to slow down. The practice of medicine is like the heart muscle's contraction - it's all or none.
Bela Schick
Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.
Dr. Benjamin Spock
I always say my God will take care of me. If it's my time I'll go and if it's not I won't. I feel that He really has a lot of important things for me to do. And He's going to make sure that I'm here to do them.
Joycelyn Elders
There are only two things a child will share willingly - communicable diseases and his mother's age.
Benjamin Spock
It felt good to sit around and agree, to have a common enemy and a shared struggle. It felt good to be understood.
Nadia Hashimi
Every promise we kept, every squeeze of the hand, every secretive smile we exchanged, every crying child we comforted- every one of those moments narrowed the distance between us.
Nadia Hashimi
It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped.
Peter Gluckman
...it is entirely illogical to consider biology in dichotomous terms of genes and environment—all of biology is based on the continuous interaction of both.
Peter Gluckman
$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding.
Frank A. Oski
Some would call that lucky but lucky is relative
Nadia Hashimi
Can a mother commit a greater sin than ignoring her intuitions?
Nadia Hashimi
Yes, well, people are very good at destroying things, good things.
Nadia Hashimi
It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.
Chris Adrian
At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse.
Mark Vonnegut
The elderly become invisible sooner than we would hope.
Nadia Hashimi
Cornered mothers pray for strange things.
Nadia Hashimi
That’s what being a mother is, isn’t it? Waiting for a rounded belly to tighten in readiness; listening for the sound of hunger in the moonlit hours; hearing an eager voice call even in the camouflage of traffic, loud music, and whirring machines. It’s looking at every door, every phone, and every approaching silhouette and feeling that slight lift, that tickle of opportunity to be again—mother.
Nadia Hashimi
In a funny way it's almost fun, having everything be so fucked up and managing to adjust. I guess you might say I'm proud. Proud of me, proud of my friends for managing to deal with this thing so well. For most people this would be the end of the world. They'd panic, their friends would panic. Things would get trampled in the stampede. But we've kept our heads, made the necessary allowances, ad can just ride this thing out.I'm pretty much just putting in time waiting for this cloud to blow over. Waiting for something to come along to make some sense out of all this. Killing time, waiting for some sort of cavalry to come over the hill. There's really not an awful lot I can do but wait. As long as there's no panic, we can hold out for damn near forever.
Mark Vonnegut
Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.
Benjamin Spock
Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope.
Nadia Hashimi
Health is more than the absence of disease. Health is about jobs and employment, education, the environment, and all of those things that go into making us healthy.
Joycelyn Elders
We all cross a hundred peaks to get even this far. And there will be more before we each make it to whatever God has fated for us.
Nadia Hashimi
It's time to undo Rahim.
Nadia Hashimi
Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.
Mark Vonnegut
After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.
Mark Vonnegut
I really miss the thought of you. I miss the hope that my future could've been a brilliant one–that you might have made it so. But I don't regret the dream even if it's gone now. And I want to thank you for inspiring it.
Leah Scheier
I am...sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.
Chris Adrian
What is gone is gone and will not come back. When the earth swallows, it swallows forever and we are left to stumble along feeling the absences. These are our burdens.
Nadia Hashimi
As children inch their way into adolescence, the parent changes. He is an authority, a source of answers, and a chastising voice. Depending on the day, he may be resented, emulated, questioned, or defied.Only as an adult can a child imagine his parent as a whole person, as a husband, a brother, or a son. Only then can a child see how his parent fits into the world beyond four walls. Saleem had only bits and pieces of his father, mostly the memories of a young boy. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, trying to reconstruct his father with the scraps he could recall or gather from his mother.
Nadia Hashimi
Children always forgive their mothers. That's the way God's designed them. He gives them two arms, two legs, and a heart that will cry 'mother' until the day it stops beating.
Nadia Hashimi
He believes that people have destroyed religion and religion has destroyed people. He says he believes in God, but he doesn't believe in people.
Nadia Hashimi
...there is for many a poverty of play and cultural life because, although the person had a place for erudition, there was a relative failure on the part of those who constitute the child's world of persons to introduce cultural elements at the appropriate phases of the person's personality development.
D.W. Winnicott
We are poor indeed if we are only sane.
D.W. Winnicott
The feminism of equality, of toughness, of anti-discrimination, has been overwhelmed by one of victimhood and demands for special treatment....At a certain point, when we demand an equal ratio of men to women in certain fields, what we’re criticizing is not “the system,” but the choices that women themselves are making.....let’s keep our eye on the question of equal opportunity and stop obsessing about equal outcomes, lest we find ourselves trying to cure society, not of sexism, but of free choice.
Elizabeth Wasserman
Children are not the people of tomorrow, but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously, and to be treated with tenderness and respect. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be. 'The unknown person' inside of them is our hope for the future.
Janusz Korczak
In automobile terms, the child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.
Benjamin Spock
To reform the world - means to reform upbringing...
Janusz Korczak
Children are touched by heaven—their every breath, every laugh, every touch a sip of water to the desert wanderer. I could not have known this as a child, but I know it as a mother, a truth I learned as my own heart grew, bent, danced, and broke for each of my children
Nadia Hashimi
Most anti-vaccine books claim that all shots are bad, the diseases aren't really anything to fear, and as long as you live a natural and healthy lifestyle, you don't have to worry. I think this is a very irresponsible approach to the vaccine issue. Vaccines are beneficial in ridding our population of both serious and nonserious diseases.
Robert W. Sears
Oftentimes I felt ridiculous giving my seal of approval to what was in reality such a natural thing to do, sort of like reinventing the wheel and extolling its virtues. Had parents' intuition sunk so low that some strange man had to tell modern women that it was okay to sleep with their babies?
William Sears
Do as you must -- you are not a child. But understand that there are many people willing to make your life more difficult. It is up to you to find a way to make things easier for yourself.
Nadia Hashimi
To be around family is to feel the possibility of growing roots again.
Nadia Hashimi
Imagine that the world had created a new 'dream product' to feed and immunize everyone born on earth. Imagine also that it was available everywhere, required no storage or delivery, and helped mothers plan their families and reduce the risk of cancer. Then imagine that the world refused to use it.
Frank A. Oski
If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder."I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.
Chris Adrian
We were pressed against each other, a husband and wife bound together not by marriage, but by the harmony of our hearts. Death could not undo us, I'd learned. My hamsar was with me still. He would watch over us, my beloved husband, as we made our way into tomorrow.
Nadia Hashimi
It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.
Mark Vonnegut
What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.
Mark Vonnegut
Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
D.W. Winnicott
The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.
Mark Vonnegut
An entire lifetime can change in one afternoon. The rest of the world can continue on, unaware of a quiet, solitary cataclysm occurring a few feet away.
Nadia Hashimi
I’m subject to occasional theological nightmares. The one that leaves me in a cold sweat every time is, I arrive at the pearly gates and the first thing I’m asked is where I went to college.
Mark Vonnegut
What he wanted to say was that two thousand years of peace could be undone in a month of war.
Nadia Hashimi
But war had a taming effect
Nadia Hashimi
Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells.
Mark Vonnegut
Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.
Mark Vonnegut
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
Mark Vonnegut
The tricky part about discovering our giftedness is that it may be in an area that feels unexpected.
Meg Meeker
Friends who love us know that motherhood is about transitioning--and adjusting, constantly, to those changes. We must become masters of change because that is what life demands of us.
Meg Meeker