Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.

The caretaking has to be done. "Somebody's got to be the mommy." Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.

... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.