“Whenever I'm with my [teenager], I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.”

“It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.”

“The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.”

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”

“And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now...”

“She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, o...”

“We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our litt...”