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

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.

When a family is free of abuse and oppression, it can be the place where we share our deepest secrets and stand the most exposed, a place where we learn to feel distinct without being better, - and sacrifice for others without losing ourselves.

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.

Friends seem to be like aspirin; we don't really know why they make a sick person feel better, but they do.

If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.