Most parents of adolescent girls have the goal of keeping their daughters safe while they grow up and explore the world. The parents' job is to protect, the daughter's job is to explore.

Traditionally parents have wondered what their teens were doing, but now teens are much more likely to be doing things that can get them killed.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

Coming out of the trance of denial is painful. But crises offer us opportunities to rethink our lives. The best thing about despair is that it wakes us up. We can see the world more clearly and open to new possibilities...And we can find new joy in the ordinary.

The two most radical things you can do in America are to slow down, and to talk to each other. If you do these things, you will improve your country.

Girls have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much, be polite,but be yourself, be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but don't comment on the sexism. . . . Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become.

we are a small, interconnected world; that we are all safe or none of us are; that we are all well cared for or all at risk.