We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.

Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape.

The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.

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.

It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.

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.

The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.