“Kids grow up in troubled homes thinking that they have the power to change their parents. Over time, they realize that they are mistaken.”

“ Inevitably, if we are to grow and change as adults, we must gradually learn to confront the challenges, paradoxes, problems and painful reality of an insecure world.”

“No one emerges from a troubled childhood without the battle scars to prove it. It is amazing that we fare as well as we do.”

“Many people feel like they were born into the wrong family. Nevertheless, adults must take responsiblity for the pain of the past and create a productive life in the present.”

“No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character... this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons.”

“Because horizon is the end of vision, and because every move we make gives the field an aspect we couldn't have noticed before, what lies beyond the horizon cannot be known. (Otherwise it would be within the horizon.) As with the angelic messenger, there is no control over what comes into our vision... There are experiences and new information that will show the familiar as strange the comforting as dangerous, the adjacent as distant. Moreover, not every shift of the viewer will reveal something significant. It can be just more of the same, or nothing worth reflecting on. And yet without that shift, we begin to lose our vision altogether: what is seen over and over again ceases to be seen. What doesn't appear in a fresh way will be thought changeless and ordinary, no longer a stimulus to thought. Learning is reduced to mere repetition and can only confirm what has already been known. Friendships become static, empty of expectations of the future. The outcome of all our efforts become predictable. All mysteries can be explained. All dimensions and measurements hold. To be aware of our horizons is to live in wonder.”

“It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.”