Caretaking Quotes

We must now become not just takers from the ocean, but caretakers of it.

My deal is that I pay more attention to whatever job I have than the relationships I have. Now, if I had considered my job to be a wife and mother, then I would have been pretty good at it. But I didn't consider it a job. I thought it was like brushing your teeth - it's not fun, it's just something you do to keep your teeth from falling out.

As women, our identity becomes subsumed by the fact that we are wives, daughters and mothers, and that becomes our all-encompassing identity. It happens with women because we are naturally driven towards being caretakers and being sacrificing.

I'm basically like a dad; I've always been a dad.

I look at people in certain circumstances, and I fall into caretaker mode real quick, real easy. I like to shoulder people up and carry them along, and then I end up creating some kind of dependency. I enable. It's really, really hard for me.

Whoever guards the fig tree shall eat its fruit.

If you ask my dad, I'm always the person that found the little bird out of the nest and is trying to put it back or take care of it.

When I was a little girl, whenever I would get sick, my mom would go and get stacks and stacks of VHS tapes from Blockbuster.

I was a bit of a mother hen at Studio 54.

I'm almost a full-time mom.

Not only do our wives need support, but our children need our deep involvement in their lives. If this period [the early years] ofprimitive needs and primitive caretaking passes without us, it is lost forever. We can be involved in other ways, but never again on this profoundly intimate level.

The sphinx will always have to be looked after.

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway.

All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.

I need to figure men out. I've been seeing men that either remind me of my mother or remind me of my father. I either end up caretaking or being abandoned so I've had enough of my romantic instincts. I need to date away from type.

...its a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

I kind of like to be one of the guardians of the game.

During my childhood, I felt older than my years because I felt responsible for my brothers and sisters.

Obviously, having a wife and a daughter is a huge responsibility.

Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.

Am I my brother's keeper? Yes. Interestingly, in my case, I share that honor with the Prospect Park Zoo.

Caregiving requires the intention of love, caretaking requires the intention of fear. Not acting in anger when you are angry requires the intention of love.

It is a woman's business to be interested in the environment. It's an extended form of housekeeping.

Robert Frost had a house in Bennington, Vermont, and I had a friend, the poet Mary Ruefle, who was the caretaker of it when it was owned by Norman Lear, the TV producer. She got a grant to go to Scotland, and she had to be gone six or nine months, so I moved in, and my job was just to make sure the ravage didn't overtake the place.