Most cooks would not, for example, prepare an important, elaborate, and difficult dish on the back-burner. Neither should we relegate the cultivation and preparation of happiness for a position where it is both hard to reach and difficult to infuse with new ingredients.

As a kid, you await holidays with a wide-eyed, passionate, almost maniacal enthusiasm. Heavy breathing is involved.

I am constantly surprised that the simple word 'feminism' raises more eyebrows and initiates more sad-faced head-shaking than any elaborate stream of invective I have ever leveled at either the I.R.S. or the D.M.V.

How about "diamonds are a girl's best friends"? Nope. It should be switched around and pointed out, instead, that your best friends are diamonds.

Fear looks both ways but still refuses to cross; fear looks twice and still doesn't leap. ... Fear usually arrives late, inevitably leaves early, and ends up never going out of town at all. Fear is the phantom hand on the back of the neck and the sound of a door opening downstairs when no one is coming home. ... Fear grows poor because it watches others gain wealth but cannot enter the fray; fear grows sick because it eats away at heath even as it fears its diminishment; fear grows old watching others live in ways that seem to threaten-but in reality only enhance-life.

We should remind ourselves that laughing together is as close as you can get to another person without touching, and sometimes it represents a closer tie than touching ever could.

Anger is the quintessential individual-signature emotion: I am what makes me mad.