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

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.

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

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

Absence makes the heart grow frozen, not fonder.

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.

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