Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.

Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

Fathers represent another way of looking at life - the possibility of an alternative dialogue.

From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there--in the liveliness of our innate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands.

Fathers have a special excitement about them that babies find intriguing. At this time in his life an infant counts on his motherfor rootedness and anchoring. He can count on his father to be just different enough from a mother. Fathers embody a delicious mixture of familiarity and novelty. They are novel without being strange or frightening.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

In every adult human there still lives a helpless child who is afraid of aloneness.... This would be so even if there were a possibility for perfect babies and perfect mothers.