Empty Nest Quotes

“The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.”
― Dorothy Parker

“To come to the door and know that she would find no one: to see a house completely empty. It was like coming to her tomb while she was still alive.”
― Iain Crichton Smith, Consider the Lilies

“The gangs filled a void in society, and the void was the absence of family life. The gang became a family. For some of those guys in the gang that was the only family they knew, because when their mothers had them they were too busy having children for other men. Some of them never knew their daddies. Their daddies never look back after they got their mothers pregnant, and those guys just grew up and they couldn’t relate to nobody.
When they had their problems, who could they have talked to? Nobody would listen, so they gravitated together and form a gang. George Mackey, the former representative for the historic Fox Hill community in The Bahamas.”
― Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father

“I realized today that a daughter is born twice. For nine months, a mother carries and nourishes her daughter in her stomach, then gives birth to her. It's a happy occasion, but the mother is left feeling sadly empty inside...But I realized today that, after raising her within my love and embrace and sending her off in marriage, this day is just as sad and leaves me just as empty as the one when I first gave birth to her.

Picture Man: Only after a parent has let go of their child will the parent truly be an adult. Living creatures leave their nest when ready. But the ones sending them off still anxiously and unnecessarily spread out their hands to catch them.”
― Kim Dong Hwa

“Think,—but no; think of nothing, leave the business of thought to me, in my long shady alleys, whose dreary melancholy will add to mine; I shall walk there long enough before I shall find the treasure I had with me the last time I was in them.”
― Marie Rabutin-Chantal De Sevigne, The Letters of Madame De Sevigne to Her Daughter and Friends

“A sacred wandering is a wilderness journey. You can find yourself in the midst of life transitions. Major upheavals. A career change. Soul searching. Infertility. Relocation. Illness. Depression. Divorce. Loss of a loved one. Unemployment. Returning to school. The empty nest.”
― Dana Arcuri, Sacred Wandering: Growing Your Faith In The Dark

“How strange is the force of imagination! it represents things as if they were actually present to us; we consider them so, and to a heart like mine, this is death. I know not where to hide myself from you.”
― Marie Rabutin-Chantal De Sevigne, The Letters of Madame De Sevigne to Her Daughter and Friends

“I was learning to map my own course and determine my own destination now that my children were no longer a home. A fire burned within my soul, igniting possibilities I previously only dreamed for myself. I was choosing to feather my empty nest with leather and chrome, not a second-hand lover.”
― Debi Tolbert Duggar, Riding Soul-O

“To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don’t have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter