Why hope to live a long life if we're only going to fill it with self-absorption, body maintenance and image repair? When we die, do we want people to exclaim 'She looked ten years younger,' or do we want them to say 'She lived a great life'?

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.

Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies.

Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.

Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.