“Nobody really wants to spend life with someone who has no other choice, and children who have been raised by a mother who gave up her life for them almost always spend years on an analyst's couch learning to spit in her eye.”

“A man spends his whole life trying to prove his worth to others. A woman spends her life trying to prove her worth to herself.”

“If you would have a boy to despise his mother, let her keep him at home, and spend her life in petting him up, and slaving to indulge his follies and caprices.”

“A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes… And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.”

“To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”

“If we learn how to love others, really, truly love them, not for who we want them to be, but rather for who they are – for the perfect souls that God has created – then we have learnt one of the greatest lessons of life.”

“the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.”

“I think the author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.”

“A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.--Louis Auchincloss”

“Don’t feel sad over someone who gave up on you, feel sorry for them because they gave up on someone who would have never given up on them.”