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

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.

There is a time in our life when we need to strut our stuff and groove on grandiosity, when we need to be viewed as remarkable and rare, when we need to exhibit ourself in front of a mirror that reflects our self-admiration, when we need a parent to function as that mirror.

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.

Mid-grade readers don't have short attention spans, they just have low boredom tolerance.

When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the street, I always hope he's dead.

Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.