I don't know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it.

Testosterone does not have to be toxic.

I know a lot and have written a lot and have thought a lot about motherhood.

Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.

The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.

And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.