My mom played the recorder. But not having electricity we had minimal exposure to music. As I got a little older we had Walkmans and things that were battery-powered but it would have been nice to be growing up in the iPod era. A tape only has six songs on a side.

For many women going back to work a few months after having a baby is overwhelming and unmanageable. As strange as it may seem things get even more difficult for a working mom after the second and third baby arrive. By that time the romance of being a modern 'superwoman' wears off and reality sets in.

Being a mom's so empowering and incredible. I'm one of those people who believes that life brings things to you at a certain time for a certain reason and if you just go with it that's where the best moments come from.

You don't realize how hard it is to live on your own. But there's no mom to do your laundry and make you dinner and to do things for you and you don't think about little things like buying paper towels and salt.

Many of my books come from what if questions that I can't answer things that I'm worried about as either a woman a wife a mom an American.

Imagine my surprise when after a lifetime of teaching me to keep personal things to myself Mom insisted my drawings were the start of a comic strip for millions of people to enjoy.

I'm more straightforward and I speak up more than I did before. When I was younger I wouldn't speak up as much but now that I'm a mom things have changed.

Every time I think I have something under control it changes and I don't have it under control. I think it takes several years to get there. Jade is 19 months old so right now I'm on alert all the time. And as a mom I think you're constantly worrying about things.

My parents are wonderful and I'm really lucky - but my mom has always been almost exclusively a right-brained person. She goes completely on her feelings of things on her intuition and so she instilled that in my brothers and I.

I make a lot of mistakes too and I'm constantly re-evaluating how I'm doing things and trying to be better every day whether it's as a mom or taking care of myself.

My mom used to make everything. She had a great garden and composted and made everything from scratch - peanut butter bread jelly everything. I don't know how she did it because all those things take time and love and labour. I only do half the stuff she does - but there's still time.

When I was little my mom tells me I used to say things like 'Mom do you hear the string section? Do you hear the string section?' And she would look at me and say 'No honey I don't know what you're talking about.'

When I was 5 some financial things happened and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say 'Don't get comfortable because we may not be here long.'

My mom and I had the same vision and we want the same things. We would always make a goal list every year.

My mother told me on several different occasions that she was livin' her dream vicariously through me. She once said that I was getting' to do all the things that she would have wanted to have done.

I think my mother is my biggest influence. There are so many things I hate about her but at the same time I'm thankful for her. All I know is that when I'm a parent I want to be just like my mom. I can talk to my mom more than any of my friends could talk to their parents.

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

Few things are impracticable in themselves and it is for want of application rather than of means that men fail to succeed.

Men will bear many things from a kept mistress which they would not bear from a wife.

We all fight over what the label 'feminism' means but for me it's about empowerment. It's not about being more powerful than men - it's about having equal rights with protection support justice. It's about very basic things. It's not a badge like a fashion item.

Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.

Men are disturbed not by things but by the view which they take of them.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.