Until you become a parent, you can’t begin to discover your capacity for strength, love and fatigue.

The line frames parenthood as a threshold experience that reveals latent reserves in a person—emotional (love), physical (fatigue), and moral or practical (strength). Its force comes from the triad: love is expansive, strength is demanded, and fatigue is the constant cost, suggesting that parenting is simultaneously enriching and exhausting. The quote also implies that certain forms of self-knowledge are inaccessible through imagination alone; they are discovered only through lived responsibility for another life. In a quotations database, it functions as a concise articulation of the transformative, identity-altering nature of caregiving.