So you're getting squeezed at both sides. You're taking care of your mom and dad and you're still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there's a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled.

So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.

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

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

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

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.