“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.”

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

Some emotions don’t make a lot of noise. It’s hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint – like a heartbeat. And pure love – why, some days it’s so quiet, you don’t even know it’s there.

Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted. Every evening they disappear. Most parents never imagine how hard they try to please us, and how miserable they feel when they think they have failed.

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn’t even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.

When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.

I read one psychologist’s theory that said, “Never strike a child in your anger.” When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he’s recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?

Children make your life important.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.

It is ludicrous to read the microwave direction on the boxes of food you buy, as each one will have a disclaimer: THIS WILL VARY WITH YOUR MICROWAVE. Loosely translated, this means, You’re on your own, Bernice.

Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden.

I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night.

He who laughs lasts.

There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.

After the currents have calmed and rocks you have endured I promise to be the river guiding you home.

You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.

We accept love only to the extent we are willing to endure heartbreak.

I survived the darkness. Crawled. Clawed. Endured. Untangled lies from truth. This wisdom is my sword.

It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.

I believe that it is impossible for two individuals not committed to their own and each other’s well being to sustain a healthy and enduring relationship.

Definition of a relationship – an enduring, mutually-agreed upon connection or union, which fulfills certain needs of the individuals involved and the society in which they live.

Nothing endures but change.