Aimee Thanatogenos > Aimee's Quotes

“The perfection of performance has escalated to the extent that the music itself is threatened with relegation.”
― Igor Stravinsky, Conversations With Igor Stravinsky

“I believe one of the most sacrificial acts of love adoptive parents can do is to give up their preconceptions and agendas about what their child's views "should" be and be open to hear the conflicting emotions and thoughts their child often experiences.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

“the truth is, the very act of adoption is built upon loss. For the birth parents, the loss of their biological offspring, the relationship that could have been, a very part of themselves. For the adoptive parents, the loss of giving birth to a biological child, the child whose face will never mirror theirs. And for the adopted child, the loss of the birth parents, the earliest experience of belonging and acceptance. To deny adoption loss is to deny the emotional reality of everyone involved.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

“I have this deep need to bond with real blood relatives, but I feel like I'm not really a part of either of my families.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“Listen to your hearts, parents! You are the expert when it comes to knowing your child. I love the Scripture that says we are to let the peace of God rule in our hearts...In other words, peace in your heart is to be like an umpire calling the shots. When in doubt--DON'T!”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

“...the advantage of having an unexpected opportunity to successfully grieve our early-life losses; to enjoy healthy relationships; to develop an unshakable sense of self-esteem; to find our unique purposes in life; to have peace about our adoption experiences; to find our true identities...now I am alive...fully alive and on the cutting edge of my life's journey. What better place could one be?”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“Because our birth mothers made a choice for us that dramatically changed the course of our lives and over which we had no control, many of us have a foundational belief (often unconscious) that we don't have the right to choose our own course in life. We feel instead that we are at the mercy of others.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“...they look at adoption through rose-colored glasses, trying to make it a win/win situation for unplanned pregnancies and infertility, never giving a thought about what effect adoption has on the child.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“How you choose to respond to each moment of the movie of life determines how you see the next frame, and the next, and eventually how you feel when the movie ends.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“It is a celebration of the fact that we were adopted for a purpose and that adoption is an experience that has the potential of teaching us some of life's richest and deepest lessons.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“Because adoption is a lifelong journey, we have a future filled with the potential to learn invaluable lessons. But many of us haven't been taught that we have a choice in every situation in life.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel, we can see it ever widening to choose the things we want to do, to take the wisdom we've learned and create something.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“If we were created from the very fiber of our birth parents' physical and emotional beings, don't you think our need to think about them would be innate? If we had primal conversations with our mother in the womb, wouldn't you say it is natural for us to think about her as we are growing up and growing old? And if our birth father's DNA helped determine the color of our hair and eyes, wouldn't you say that he is just as much a part of us as our mother and it is normal to want a relationship with him? Wherever we are in the spectrum of perceptions about our birth parents, we must rest assured that our thoughts are normal and healthy. They are part of the fiber of our being. Part of the package of being adopted. It is all about our identity...our dual identity.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“It can undermine the most sincere parental commitment and force adoptees to suffer in private, choosing either rebellion or conformity as a mode of relating.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

“Adoptive parents often say about adoption day: "It was the happiest day of our lives!" While most of us are happy to be adopted, our own hearts tell us that adoption day was the most painful day of our lives, for the person with whom we shared deep intimacy suddenly disappeared from our world.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“You realize you've never walked in another person's shoes. Never have. Never will. The same is true in adoption. There are three sets of adoption shoes sitting at the end of the boardwalk. The adoptees...the birth parents'...and the adoptive parents'. Each is unique and each has a story to tell.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“Then one detail caught my attention. "Time (of birth), 5:57 A.M." Wow! I really was born! I wasn't an alien who was dropped down into my adoptive parents' arms. I was a real baby who experienced a real birth from a real mother at a real time of day. For me, that tid-bit of information was like a meal to a starving woman.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“The remarkable thing we have is a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past...we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

“Read Talking With Young Children About Adoption by Susan Fisher, M.D., and Mary Watkins, Ph.D. (Yale University Press, 1995).”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

“Truth becomes the foundation for every other life task.”
― Sherrie Eldridge

“over which we had no control, but for which we feel responsible. Children of divorce feel it, a widow visiting her husband”
― Sherrie Eldridge, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.”
― Chris Hedges

“Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction. Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen. This belief encourages us to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings. These specialists in "happiness" have formulated something they call the "Law of Attraction." It argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on. Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity. The ideology justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress. And many of us have internalized this pernicious message, which in times of difficulty leads to personal despair, passivity and disillusionment.”
― Chris Hedges

“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle