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

Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose.

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.

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

READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that's tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw.

One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.

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