many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adolescent love.

If his mother was drowning and I was drowning and he had to choose one of us to save, He says he'd save me.

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

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.

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

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.

Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on--our lost narcissism lives on--in our ego ideal.