“Today women live long into their children's adult lives . . . too little is made of the pleasure we women feel in conversing with our grown children, and in allowing ourselves, from time to time, to think of them as friends. I have been fortunate in having children with whom conversation is possible; the sheerest pleasure here, for me, has been in meeting with them each alone . . . [p. 185]”

“I wonder if it won't be the same with the children as it has been with us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won't their lives feel to them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same with them. Unfinished lives. Oh, dearie, what children all of us are.”

“It is not possible to satisfy women," a friend said. "We are disturbed if we have children too young. Disturbed if we have then later. Disturbed if we don't have children at all.”

“[Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.”

“Published in this month's Harper's, from a conversation held in Beijing in February 1973:Chairman Mao Zedong: Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million.U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger: The chairman is improving his offer.Mao: We can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children, and our children are too many.”

“One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience, and experience has made them cautious in their conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw from this the fine maxim that one should not scold children too much, but should make them trustful, so that they will not conceal their stupidities from us?”