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

I don't intend to stop showing a little cleavage. Nor do I intend to stop flashing a little thigh.

Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the wine taste richer, the laughter ring louder because they are there.

Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.

Serious skeptics, true believers, and seekers of every stripe will want to read Mitch Horowitz's vibrant, probing, and richly researched account of the impact of the positive-thinking movement on every aspect of American life today. Filled with a cast of remarkable characters and many lively tales, One Simple Idea is a readable, responsible examination of the limits and possibilities of mind-power as a source of constructive transformation.

Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.

A normal adolescent is so restless and twitchy and awkward that he can mange to injure his knee--not playing soccer, not playing football--but by falling off his chair in the middle of French class.