Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.

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

as we acquire new aches and new pains, our health care is, of necessity, being supplied by internists, cardiologists, dermatologists, podiatrists, urologists, periodontists, gynecologists and psychiatrists, from all of whom we want a second opinion. We want a second opinion that says, don't worry, you are going to live forever.

I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

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

We grow because the clamorous, permanent presence of our children forces us to put their needs before ours. We grow because our love for our children urges us to change as nothing else in our lives has the power to do. We grow (if we're willing to grow, that is: not every parent is willing) because being a parent helps us stop being a child.

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