For a couple of months there I was shrieking like a banshee.

If you focus all of your emotional passion on your children and you neglect the relationship that brought that family into existence... eventually, things can go really, really wrong.

Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.

One of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.

If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

Roaring like a tiger turns some children into pianists who debut at Carnegie Hall but only crushes others. Coddling gives some the excuse to fail and others the chance to succeed.

You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven jeans and Marc Jacobs sling-backs, but she's still going to expect a passel of grandkids.

In a perfect world I think we would microdose with LSD instead of giving teenagers Adderall. But I'd like to see it studied first.

Why is it that loving something provides such little protection from betrayal?

Let's all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business. Failing that, let's go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another's backs.

By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat.

Say your heart out.. work that dream out.. for the time won't be back again.

My goal as a parent is to prepare you for the future, not to make you like me.

I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the tower, the house I built for myself at Bollingen.

To worry before the common people worries; To enjoy only after the people can enjoy.

I have always maintained that Iggy Pop is the Heavyweight Champion of Rock & Roll.

I have got five minutes, some whip-its, and the key to the executive bathroom.

I have thoughts every day that are themselves tweets.

I tend to worry about the minutiae of life. But living in the mountains of Idaho and having retreated from fame, I am more in tune with life.

My father and mother in 1817 were forty-nine days on the road with their emigrant wagons [from Vermont] to Ohio. More than two days for each hour that I spent in the same journey.

Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.