And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.
My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.
Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.
But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.
I sort of feel like it comes around again. That when you get to a certain age, when you’ve lived enough and you’ve got your friends to support you and your family to support you, you wake up one morning and think, yeah, I’m okay.
What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.
It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows – and never forgets – that they are yours.
I think there was a long period of time when we got real invested in a youth culture, and not coincidentally it was when the baby boomers, who let’s face it, take up a lot of space on the planet, were young.
Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.
The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.
Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it’s sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.
I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.
There’s some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn’t let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.
Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.
The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.
I’m sure not afraid of success and I’ve learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I’m afraid of now is of being someone I don’t like much.
The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.
People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.
Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.