Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.

To me, a person's identity is composed of both an 'I' and a 'we.' The 'I' finds itself in love, work, and pleasure, but it also locates itself within some meaningful group identity - a tribe, a community, a 'we.' America is too big and bland a tribe for most of us.

I used to anticipate my childhood birthday parties as if each were an annual coronation. Like most kids, I loved sitting at the head of the table with a crown on my head.

I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.

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.

Apathy is the self-defense of the powerless.