“Loving children is easy. Keeping them is hard.”

“People think it’s easy to be cynical and pessimistic, but it’s incredibly hard work. It’s much easier to be hopeful.”

“Love and pain are not the same. But sometimes it feels like they should be. Love is put to test everyday. Pain is not. Yet the two of them are inseparable because true love cannot bear separation.”

“Raising children I’ve decided is a lot sadder than I expecte4d. Seeing them grow up brightly and vividly is tempered by the knowledge that each year brings another share of lasts. The last time I push my daughter on a swing. The last time I play Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. The last time I read a bedtime story. If I could give my daughters one piece of advice I would tell them to make the most of the first times -their first kiss, their first date, their first love, the first smile of their first child…There can only be one.”

“It's strange, talking about love. I used to hate the word.Hate is too strong. I was sick of reading about it in books, hearing it in songs, watching it in films. It seemed such a huge burden to place on another person - to love them; to give them something so unbelievably fragile and expect them not to break it or lose it or leave it behind on the No.96 bus.”

“Norman Mailer said there were four stages in a marriage: first the affair then the marriage, then children and then finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.”

“Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt? (135)”