Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

We are all persons courtesy of someone else, and since we need others to perceive us in order to experience ourselves, it is very hard to like yourself when those nearest you seem to doubt your worth. And when those around you don’t see you as you want to see yourself, it is only too easy to lose the way and start auditioning instead for them.

I overheard a young man once saying to his wife, “I can’t control you. That’s the problem and it’s been the problem ever since day one!” And then I heard her answer him and heard her terrible voice. “No!” she said. “The problem isn’t that you can’t control me, the problem is that you’re trying to. Why don’t you stop worrying about controlling me and start worrying about controlling yourself?

The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me that no one is cheated in this world, unless it’s by himself.

Marriage is supposed to do everything, like Duz, which is more than half its problem. It is said to save us, define us, give us purpose, keep us from loneliness, and incidentally balance our diet and wash our socks, and when it doesn’t, we get divorced.

One can’t run in a park without a dog or make angels in the snow without a child and there are things one can’t do without a lover, so the loss of the lover is like an amputation and the patient goes into shock.

Perhaps the old view of ‘Me breadwinner, you hausfrau’ worked for our grandparents, when people obligingly popped off before boring each other to death, but it won’t work any longer because we are living too long and divorce is needed today to do what death acomplished more economically before.

No marriage is one person’s failure any more than it’s one person’s success, so it works best to see a marriage that has ended simply as something that didn’t work out.

Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself. If you don’t have friends you see much less than you otherwise might.

The answer doesn’t lie in learning how to protect ourselves from life-it lies in learning how to become strong enough to let a bit more of it in.