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.

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.

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.

Control is a big issue when you're sick. It's the first thing you lose - other losses come later.

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

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

Apathy is the self-defense of the powerless.