My mom Irmelin taught me the value of life. Her own life was saved by my grandmother during World War II.

Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? The mother.

I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me.

It's the moms of this nation - single married widowed - who really hold this country together. We're the mothers we're the wives we're the grandmothers we're the big sisters we're the little sisters we're the daughters. You know it's true don't you? You're the ones who always have to do a little more.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

It is past time for women to take their rightful place side by side with men in the rooms where the fates of peoples where their children's and grandchildren's fates are decided.

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.

Three of my children are medical doctors they know at least a hundred times as much about your body as my grandfather knew but they don't know much more about soul than he did.

My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people so there's no virtue in that it's the way one is raised.

I was a bartender for a long time so I know how to make drinks but I'm more likely to offer them than to have them. I think this is one of the reasons why I get to live longer than my great-grandmother did and why I get to produce more writing than she did and why my marriage isn't in dire straits.