“You know," Marion said, "I met a woman once when I was a teenager. I knew she had gone through a lot but she was so strong, so compassionate. I asked her how she could be the way she was, and you k...”

“When Sean died she understood for the first time how completely human beings were dependent upon a suspension of disbelief in order to simply move forward through their days. If that suspension fal...”

“TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every onc...”

“You're not traveling if you already know everything.”

“She simply didn't have an interest in men anymore. It wasn't that she didn't like them, she just knew how easily they broke.”

“She quickly realized she had an affinity for the older books and their muted scents of past dinners and foreign countries, the tea and chocolate stains coloring the phrases. You could never be cert...”

“A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY Not leaving: an act of trust and love,often deciphered by children”

“The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic...”

“When God Created Mothers"When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one." And ...”

“And he gave it for his opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do ...”

“We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them,...”

“The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvag...”

“Along with individual responsibility goes some societal responsibility to enable young people and their parents to do what they need to do. Otherwise, what is a society?”