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

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

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

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'?

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

The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her "job" is that the children's growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother's indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.

Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.