Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history.

You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

I have dedicated my life to a doomed struggle against reality and the things that cannot be otherwise

He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

The way religion makes thousands believe is itself a miracle.

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.

When working on a project, if you put away a tool that you're certain you're finished with, you will need it instantly.

All of us are displaced. Few people live where their great-grandparents lived or speak the language their great-grandparents spoke.

To me, NOTHING is 'new'.

No one expected you to amount to much," she told me. "Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard.

We're all trying to be artists making our own unique statements. I think the only real way to do that is through failure.