A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.

I have paid as much as $300 a night to throw up into a sink shaped like a seashell.

I remember thinking how often we look, but never see ... we listen, but never hear ... we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive.

Those magazine dieting stories always have the testimonial of a woman who wore a dress that could slipcover New Jersey in one photo and thirty days later looked like a well-dressed thermometer.

One son appears in stereo - a transistor in one ear and the phone in the other.

It's frightening to wake up one morning and discover that while you were asleep you went out of style.

I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing.... Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, "I told you so.