We're [as parents] striving for an unattainable, inauthentic shell, and ignoring the real nut, the gooey inside: love, laughter, and fulfillment from simple things.

But we should open our eyes to the many ways in which hypervigilance keeps them penned in from the more liberated life they deserve to live and that in turn would prepare them for adulthood.

Resilience is built from real hardship and cannot be bought or manufactured.

We’re depriving our kids of the chance to do the work of life for themselves.

Young adults come to resent the people who did the thinking for them.

A sense of purpose is essential for achieving happiness and satisfaction in life.

There is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult.

Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do but you suck it up and do it anyway, and that's what teaches you humility, work ethic, responsibility, and follow-through.

Happiness and self-confidence can be the by-products of other things, but they cannot really be goals unto themselves.

Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.

Our town carves up and spits out a few seeds each year. We all approach autumn with dread because nobody wants to be a seed.

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

You shouldn't eat red meat, but you shouldn't make resolutions you can't keep.

Love is the energy from which all people and things are made. You are connected to everything in your world through love.

If people want me to be their role-model, it would be nice.

Dada is like your hopes: nothing like your paradise: nothing like your idols: nothing like your heroes: nothing like your artists: nothing like your religions: nothing

Man’s works do not even come close to the works of the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit does not work, all the efforts of man will come to naught.

But although life is not energy, any more than it is matter, yet it directs energy and thereby controls arrangements of matter.

In real life, I'm not super-posh but if that's the stereotype, I really don't care. It could be worse.