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.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

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.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

Owning our past allows us to own our future.

Some people say that parents don't matter, and that's not true at all. The irony is that we pay attention to all these things that don't matter, and not to what does matter, such as parents having enough resources to provide an environment where their children have both security and freedom.