No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a really nice man who wishes she were not.

The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.

For some of us, “chauvinism” is simply a shortening of “male chauvinism.” For others, it is a reminder of the dangers of devotion to the superiority of any group, gender, race, religion, or nation, or even to the truths of any era.

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.

It is not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many woman laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance.

If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return...

Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.

Part of the task of composing a life is the artist’s need to find a way to take what is simply ugly and, instead of trying to deny it, to use it in the broader design.