“Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.”

When you’re lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.

Friends are “annuals” that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a “perennial” that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There’s a place in the garden for both of them.

Every puppy should have a boy.

For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.

When you look like your passport photo, it’s time to go home.

A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn’t charge more after midnight – or anything before midnight.

Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.

I was trampled to death by a man who believed his luggage would be the first piece off. If he were an experienced traveler, he would know that the first piece of luggage belongs to no one. It’s just a dummy suitcase to give everyone hope.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

It is my theory you can’t get rid of fat. All you can do is move it around, like furniture.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.

Your guilty all the same. Too sick to be ashamed. You want to point the finger, but there’s no one else to blame.

We may not all be equally guilty. But we are all equally responsible for building a decent and just society.

Paintings are seldom guilty and often framed for crimes they did not commit. Some cover holes-holes in walls, holes in lives. Some make holes-in wallets, holes in hearts in negative space.

Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.

From the body of one guilty deed a thousand ghostly fears and haunting thoughts proceed.

It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.

I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason toward my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.