Being wanted is the tender heel of everything human.

our sons and daughters are only passing through. ... If we are lucky, they always will consider our home their harbor, but they are headed out to the open sea, almost from the first.

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.

Being wanted is the tender heel of everything human.

Anybody can become a widow. There aren't any special qualifications. It happens in less time than it takes to draw a breath. It doesn't require the planning, for example, that it takes to become a wife or a mother or any of the other ritual roles of womanhood.

It's faith that really takes the courage, the belief in things unseen.

Nothing better for the hormones and worse for the heart than the right boy at the right time.