Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

In the evaluation of the dominant moods of any historical period it is important to hold fast to the fact that there are always islands of self-sufficient order — on farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters — where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives: as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

If life is to be sustained, hope must remain.

In America nature is autocratic, saying, "I am not arguing, I am telling you.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.