“I often start with a question as big and unwieldy as why do we have children – or what are we investing in when we love and raise our children; it’s a process of looking for structures – images or rhetorical figures – that will contain my questions.”

“How can we tell our children that — when we have ourselves so often cried out in bitter despair at what we regarded to be the injustice of life — and when we have so often surrendered?”

“We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.”

“Gradually it dawned on me that I was painting my own inner emotions. Those children were asking: "Why are we here? What is life all about? Why is there sadness and injustice?" All those deep questions. Those children were sad because they didn't have the answers. They were searching.”

“The question of consciousness has always intrigued me. It starts with the question, 'Are we our bodies or are we our consciousness? What are we made up of?”

“Perhaps the biggest appreciation adjustment we need is toward the millions of men and women we call stepparents. We have taken for granted especially the stepparents who are raising no children of their own, and receiving no income from a significant other, but who have nevertheless chosen to invest love, time and money in children.”

“We often take for granted the terms, the premises, and the methods that prevail in our time and place. We take for granted, as the starting points for our own thinking, the outcomes of a process of thinking by our predecessors. … New questions are built from the answers that were given to the old questions, but the old questions are now no longer asked. Foundations get covered up by what is built upon them.”

“It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.”

“Why is it fair game to question conservatives' love or loyalty to children or to their fellow man, but beyond the pale to question liberals' love of country?”

“My wife and I have five children, and the reason we have five children is because we do not want six.”