"The only big things I've purchased are my dad's heart valve and a Rolls-Royce for my parents, for their anniversary. And that was only because my dad had a Lady Gaga license plate on our old car and it was making me crazy because he was getting followed everywhere, so I bought him a new car."

"My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and she's all, 'No, I mean a real doctor.' She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache."

"I have a 6-year-old niece who doesn't look like the majority of girls on the covers of magazines. I hope that by the time she's 16, the world will have changed."

"Jeb is going to grow up to be the kind of man who spends his Saturdays teaching his little boy to ride a bike. (...) Charlie, on the other hand, will be off playing golf while his kid kills people on his Xbox. Charlie will be dashing and debonair, and he'll buy his kid all kinds of crap, but he'll never actually be there."

"When I look at my daughter, who's 24, she is much more confident than I ever was and her expectations are higher. But I worry that there is a backlash brewing against progress on equality."

"I've got two young sons who, when I ask them and their friends how they feel about gay marriage, kinda give me one of those looks like, 'Gosh, Mom, why are you even asking that question?'."

"Ruth once wrote, “Dear Journal, Never let a single day pass without saying an encouraging word to each child . . .‘More people fail for lack of encouragement,’ someone wrote, ‘than for any other reason."

"If her mother had been observing this interaction, she'd tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation.If her father were here, he'd put his finger to his lips and say, 'Shh.'Clementine settled for two words.'I'm sorry,' she said."

"So I'll send my parents money, and maybe they can get a bigger place, too. They can even relax when they're older, the way they deserve to. Without having to worry about how they're going to survive. But for now, I'm the one who has to survive."

"All seek perfection from our parents … Just wait till your parents start depending on you, that is when your own perfection, or lack thereof, will be apparent."

"My father was an electrical engineer who worked at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. When I was growing up, my mother wrote humor columns for the local paper. She was the Erma Bombeck of Murrysville, Pa."