I will tell them that you can work hard, you can improve your life and the lives of your children in one day when you deliver your youngest child to the university, you will look her in the eye and say, 'You will give back.'
As a child, I heard many warnings from teachers about the perils of talking with strangers. Yet now, fairly late in my life, I can think of not many things better than to talk with strangers. The idea of being a stranger is also very appealing.
I think the heartbreak of September 11 - America's grief not only over the loss of life but also the loss of our own innocence - has expanded us as people because it has tenderized our hearts. On a psychological level, the American people have mature...
As a child, I felt that Hallowe'en was a time when creatures of the night suddenly came to life - we would turn off all the lights in the house and let flickering candlelight conjure up scary shadows and create the effect of imaginary figures lurking...
My father died when I was 7. I was his favorite child, and he was my beloved father. I brought him along with me all through my life. Every elderly man has a bit of my father in him for me.
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastar...
I was a middle child. I grew up in Brooklyn with three sisters and a brother. You know what that means: everybody is constantly fighting with everybody and you are in the middle of the storm trying to make peace. That is your life. Making everybody w...
Before my first child was born, I had nothing going on professionally really, and it's been a very blessed period of creativity for me since he arrived. It's very surreal. It's almost as if the babies are out there pulling strings somewhere, deciding...
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, wo...
It's not like I want to hop on a bandwagon, because I said it 15 years ago - bringing a child into your life who is not genetically yours is one of the most beautiful things you can do. But I'm also interested in having my own baby, too.
I don't want to approach reading from the viewpoint of that it's a pleasant adjunct to your life. I want to approach it from the idea that you have to read or you're going to suffer. There's a difference to be made - and you can make it if you read w...
How do you build a relationship when you've hardly shared a word but suddenly share a child? How do you love a daughter you don't see for nearly two years? When does she become your daughter? How does she become your daughter?
Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?
When I had a child, everyone was telling me that I was going to see the world through her eyes, and everything was going to get this nice gloss to it. I kept waiting for that to happen, and thought there was a real problem with me that it wasn't.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too . . . she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.
I told her I wanted a plastic surgeon to sew me up, and I wanted her to freeze my ovaries, so I could harvest the eggs and have a biological child through a surrogate.
To talk about God, except in the context of prayer, is to take His name in vain. One may, indeed, talk to a child about God, but this is on a par with telling him that he was brought to his mother by a stork.
Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching.
Magnus raised his hands above his head and clapped once. The room flooded with light. "You see? You think that would be possible without magic? "Actually," replied Simon, "It is. If you watched infomercials you'd know that.
It's not funny, Jace," Alec interrupted, starting to his feet. "Are you just going to let her stand there and call me names?" "Yes," Jace said kindly. "It'll do you good-- try to think of it as endurance training.
If there's a thing I've learned in my life it's to not be afraid of the responsibility that comes with caring for other people. What we do for love: those things endure. Even if the people you do them for don't
