You may never have proof of your importance but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who.

One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. The grass is greenest where it is watered.

When my father finally got around to teaching me to drive, he was impressed at my "natural" talent for driving, not knowing that I had already been secretly driving my mother's car around the neighborhood. When I took the test and got my license and my father gave me my own set of keys to the car one night at dinner, it was a major rite of passage for him and my mother. Their perception of me had changed and was formally acknowledged. For me the occasion meant a private sanction to do in public what I had already been doing in secret.

My secret agenda is to convey my values to my kids.

One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was thirteen was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands - bare hands - and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage. To top that, I saw her reach into the wet garbage bag and fish around in there looking for a lost teaspoon. Bare hands - a kind of mad courage.