Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a great honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie").

Pretending can be a bold form of experimentation and inventiveness. In pretending joy or happiness, we may discover or enhance our capacity for it.

As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.

The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.

Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.

Often when someone apologizes - like a parent who says to a child, "I'm very sorry I neglected you when you were a kid" - they also ask, "Do you forgive me?," because they want the other person to be over it. However, healing can take a great deal of time. And if we forgive too quickly, we cut the process short.