We are all born into families and cultures we didn't choose, given names we didn't pick, instructed in behaviour and values we might not have freely chosen, and too often we end up expected to live lives designed by others.

But after a while, she began to experience the new reality of each person as being as strong and as weak as anyone else. Slowly, she learned that each of us grown-ups has as much and as little power as the other, and that we had best learn to take care of ourselves.(83)

For each of us, the only hope resides in his own efforts, in completing his own story, not in the other's interpretation. (63)

He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.

If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond, then some will care, though others may not. But who can love me, if no one knows me? I must risk it, or live alone.

Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free.

In the long run we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.