Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

All of us gardeners know that nothing comes out the way you planned. It's a different garden every year, and it's always sort of different from what you were thinking when you began. What it really means to be a good gardener is to work hard to produce an ecosystem that will have enough diversity, enough possibilities, so it's robust, and it's resilient, and it can change when the seasons change. And that kind of robust, unexpected, variable, messy system - that's what you want to create when you're having children, too.

Caring for children has always been one of the deepest and most satisfying things that a human being does, and yet it is hard to keep a healthy attitude toward it in our competitive, outcome-oriented society.

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.

On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.

To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.