“I want to love you without clutching, appreciate you without judging, join you without invading, invite you without demanding, leave you without guilt, criticize you without blaming, and help you w...”

“I am Me. In all the world, there is no one else exactly like me. Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine, because I alone chose it -- I own everything about me: my body, my feelings, ...”

“So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.”

“We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”

“Every word, facial expression, gesture, or action on the part of a parent gives the child some message about self-worth. It is sad that so many parents don't realize what messages they are sending.”

“What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”

“When the people whom we love the most leave us, we start learning to live with the shadows they have left inside us.”

“The learnin' mind is the livin' mind... an' any sort o' smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.”