“...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.”

“I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.”

“These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive.”

“The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.”

“Yet in my experience, when left to their own devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.”

“The idea is that you don't only have one destiny. Younger and younger, kids are pressed to decide what they want to do with their lives, as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go there are going to be upsides and downsides. You're dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one course in comparison to which all the others are crap.....There are varying advantages and disadvantages to each competing future. But I didn't want to have one bad and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”

“The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.”