Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, she will mention her girlfriends.

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.