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

The need to become a separate self is as urgent as the yearning to merge forever. And as long as we, not our mother, initiate parting, and as long as our mother remains reliably there, it seems possible to risk, and even to revel in, standing alone.

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.

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.

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

Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.

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.