Being in love is better than being in jail, a dentist's chair, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia, but not if he doesn't love you back.

We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.

Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.

Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone--childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

the lives we lead are determined, for better and worse, by our loss experiences.

Control cannot be called conscience until we are able to take it inside us and make it our own, until--in spite of the fact that the wrongs we have done or imagined will never be punished or known--we nonetheless feel that the clutch in the stomach, that chill upon the soul, that self-inflicted misery called guilt.

For many men the denial of dependency on their mother is repeated in their subsequent relationships, sometimes by an absence of any sexual interest in women, sometimes by a pattern of loving and leaving them.