We're never ready for the things that happen. When the big stuff happens, we're always looking in the other direction.

You have to speak your dream out loud.

And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

Raising people is not some lark. It's serious work with serious repercussions. It's air-traffic control. You can't step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.

Appreciation is the purest,strongest form of love. It is the outward-bound kind of love that asks for nothing and gives everything.

How seriously can I take myself? I'm just one of six billion people, right?

The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she's gone, it's a whole different game.

He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.

That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages--becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors.

I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.

I didn't know adults could be changed. I thought they were finished pieces, baked through and kiln dried.

Jewelry maybe is more expensive than clothes, but clothes are more important than jewelry.

I'm watching you, big boy, my eyes say, but his are closed so it's an optical monologue.

A weapon is only an extension of one’s own persona

The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years.

One Christmas build-up tradition, however, has totally bypassed me - that of going up to town and 'doing a show.'

I spend so much time on the Internet...I feel like I'm a million pages into the worst book ever, and I'm never going to stop reading.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Mike Dukakis? He's the salt of the earth.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didnt: It was basically a semantics game.

I don't really feel McCain. It ain't just because Barack is black; he can make change. Just like Bush equals recession, Barack equals progression.