Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.

Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.

An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.

Empathy grows as we learn.

someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, but which we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to.