The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.

There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.