Love her as in childhood Through feeble, old and grey. For you’ll never miss a mother’s love Till she’s buried beneath the clay.

I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove, to condemn the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.

When a new baby laughs for the first time a new fairy is born, and as there are always new babies there are always new fairies.

You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.

I didn't grow up in a traditional family, and I never had a family dinner around the table, so whenever I actually had a dinner 'plan,' it meant a lot to me; it made me feel excited and safe.