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.

If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty-and frightened too.

Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer...from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger.

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

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

Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?

Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.