“We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.”

“I wonder if I wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you'. I wonder if just enjoying your kids company isn't more important.”

“Discomfort begets discomfort in others.”

“I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important.”

“You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.”

“I suspect that children want their parents to be busy; they don't want to have to fill your schedule with their paltry needs. Children want to be assured that there are other things to do, important things; more important, on occasion, than they are.”

“...it's not all it's cracked up to be, having real emotions. I know that with the most dazzling men there have been times I've been terribly bored and I am sure they've been equally bored with me. Then much of life is indeed boring, and that's nobody's fault....Myself, I've been in the very arms of a beloved and felt nothing, when the only choice was whether to admit I felt nothing or to lie. The hardest thing about loving someone is those moments when you're not. And there are inevitablty such moments; the amount of trust required to get past them is stupendous.”