“A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn’t play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly.”

In the distance someone is singing.

Tie your heart at night to mine, love, and both will defeat the darkness like twin drums beating in the forest against the heavy wall of wet leaves.

What did the earth teach the trees? How to speak to the sky.

I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to glimpse you in every window.

Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss.

As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

I love you as one loves certain dark things.

I move in the university of the waves.

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we’re neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.

I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter.

To feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.

To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

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

Every child in every neighborhood, of every color, class and background, deserves a school that will help them succeed.

When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.

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

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

I don’t mind fans coming up in a friendly, respectful way. That’s all part of the fun of being a top tennis player. But if people take pictures without permission, particularly if my children are in the shot, I feel uncomfortable.

I’m not a role model. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.