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.

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.

No-fault guilt: This is when, instead of trying to figure out who's to blame, everyone pays.

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.

Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.

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

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.