Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.

We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.

Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.

Eventually we will learn that the loss of indivisible love is another of our necessary losses, that loving extends beyond the mother-child pair, that most of the love we receive in this world is love we will have to share--and that sharing begins at home, with our sibling rivals.

We have to divide mother love with our brothers and sisters. Our parents can help us cope with the loss of our dream of absolute love. But they cannot make us believe that we haven't lost it.

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.

Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.