My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age.

Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

Husbands come and go; children come and eventually they go. Friends grow up and move away. But the one thing that's never lost is your sister.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

by operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.

The source of continuing aliveness was to find your passion and pursue it, with whole heart and single mind.

The fundamental steps of expansion that will open a person, over time, to the full flowering of his or her individuality are the same for both genders. But men and women are rarely in the same place struggling with the same questions at the same age.