Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.

The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.

Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way.

But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost

Comfort becomes a goal when distinctions of rank are abolished and privileges destroyed.

God doesn't want your leftovers. God wants your love overtures, your first-overs, because He is your first love.

The nightmare is you spend the rest of your life being funny at parties and then people say, 'Why didn't you do that when you were on television?'

The comforters head never akes.

Rock is so much fun. That's what it's all about - filling up the chest cavities and empty kneecaps and elbows.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

If manners maketh the man as someone said, then he's the hero of the day.

Poverty, discrimination, and ignorance restrict growth.

Sometimes you have to face up to your fears to realize that they aren't actually real.