Friendships aren't perfect and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.

We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight.

Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.

A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it.

If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.

No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife.

You never understand life until it grows inside of you.

Humanity is not a word my friend. It is a symbol – a symbol of hope – a symbol of wisdom – yet this very symbol has become disgraced by our faults and deluded justification of mistakes.

Families help us learn what unconditional love is

It's a very odd thing As odd as can be That whatever Miss T. eats Turns into Miss T.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

I urge a willingness to reserve a place in rational science for non-rational wonder.

I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.

It's not how deep you go, it's how you go deep.

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.