“As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.”

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.

The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”

Well to me growing, up I’ve had my own psychological war with my parents dying at such a young age. My mother was killed by a drunk driver, then two months later my father drowned.

Smoke Signals really mirrored the way I grew up and how I felt, and that movie was the first time I’d dealt with my parents’ death and how I felt that loss and sadness and anger.

I like my parents but they are just not good parents. They are nice enough people. I’m not interested in hurting their feelings.

It’s what I do but not who I am. Who I am is a parent. I’m a family man.

Parents are often at fault, but the kids have some work to do, too.

Society, parents they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you were born with.

I think the one thing this picture shows that’s new is the psychological disproportion of the kids’ demands on the parents.

Some people surrender their freedom willingly but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth.