We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.
When men are oppressed, it’s a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it’s tradition.
If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.
If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable – each segment distinct.
Friends can be said to “fall in like” with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.
When a family is free of abuse and oppression, it can be the place where we share our deepest secrets and stand the most exposed, a place where we learn to feel distinct without being better, – and sacrifice for others without losing ourselves.
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?
If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.
As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son’s future are counting on me.
The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy.
Illness is the proving ground of friendship.
To me, a person’s identity is composed of both an ‘I’ and a ‘we.’ The ‘I’ finds itself in love, work, and pleasure, but it also locates itself within some meaningful group identity – a tribe, a community, a ‘we.’ America is too big and bland a tribe for most of us.
I used to anticipate my childhood birthday parties as if each were an annual coronation. Like most kids, I loved sitting at the head of the table with a crown on my head.
Work-family conflicts – the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child – would not be forced upon women with suchsanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.
No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife.
If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.
When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol.
What I often say to people who are quick to say I’m not a feminist is if you think you’re not a feminist, give it all back.