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.

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.

The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it.

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

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

Friendships aren't perfect and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release.

Before devising any blueprint that includes the assumption of Having It All, we need to ask ... Why do we need Everything?