If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable – each segment distinct.
A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it.
Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.
Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.
America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.
Children’s liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.
Friends seem to be like aspirin; we don’t really know why they make a sick person feel better, but they do.
Boys don’t make passes at female smart asses.
A family stitched together with love seldom unravels.
Friendships aren’t perfect and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release.
The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her “job” is that the children’s growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother’s indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.
The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual liberation, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries.
Apathy is the self-defense of the powerless.
Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let ‘born again’ patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.
Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies.
I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.
Mothers remember a child’s first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.
I want to visit Memory Lane, I don’t want to live there.
It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody – doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.
Control is a big issue when you’re sick. It’s the first thing you lose – other losses come later.
We can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict.