I could be such a wonderful wife to another wife's husband.

We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information . . . strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the . . . inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.

Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it.

It is true that the present is powerfully shaped by the past. But it is also true that ... insight at any age keeps us from singing the same sad songs again.

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.

But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

For we lose not only by death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on.