Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

I don't know what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they'll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that flavors work their own ways under the skin, into the heart of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will have trees enough with arms to receive them.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.