Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it.

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .