When divorce, death, disease, sexual abuse, medical abuse, physical violence, poverty, wealth, drug addiction, alcoholism, fractures a family. The pain and damage runs deep. It takes courage and intelligence to move forward with an open heart. 

To me, Texas signified strange days, querulous wanderings, bloody fairy tales, hot, moon-filled nights, earthworms, and unbought flowers. Texas was women to me: my aunt dying of cancer, my grandmother’s hunchbacked sister, and Eloisa. All laughing, laughing.
― Denise Chávez, The Last of the Menu Girls

“Only farmers and the young, who live dependent upon change, understand what it is to know the continual flowering of life, however subtle.”
― Denise Chávez, The Last of the Menu Girls

“Remember the past, but don't get lost back there. Celebrate the blessings of the past in the present, but remember to live today. Today is built on the past and tomorrow is evolving from both the past and the present. The future? Quien sabe? Hopefully, there will always be tacos”
― Denise Chávez, A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture

“Parents often fail to address early childhood lying, since the lying is almost innocent—their child’s too young to know what lies are, or that lying’s wrong. When their child gets older and learns those distinctions, the parents believe, the lying will stop. This is dead wrong, according to Dr. Talwar.”
― Po Bronson, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

“siblings between the ages of three and seven clash 3.5 times per hour, on average. Some of those are brief clashes, others longer, but it adds up to ten minutes of every hour spent arguing.”
― Po Bronson, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

“It's when children are at their most mysterious that we, their caretakers, can learn something new.”
― Po Bronson / Ashley Merryman

“In taking our marital arguments upstairs to avoid exposing the children to strife, we accidentally deprived them of chances to witness how two people who care about each other can work out their differences in a calm and reasoned way.”
― Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

“Might our culture-wide perception of what it means to be a teenager be unwittingly skewed by the fact they don’t get enough sleep?”
― Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

“Darling found that permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their child’s lives. “Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t actually care—that their parent doesn’t really want this job of being the parent.” ― Po Bronson, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

“In one study, Cummings found that children’s emotional well-being and security are more affected by the relationship between the parents than by the direct relationship between the parent and child.”
― Po Bronson, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

“You want to know where your fears are hiding? Tell me what you know about yourself. Tell me what you can't live without.” ― Po Bronson, What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question

“Rather than “Survival of the Fittest”—which wasn’t from Charles Darwin; it was a philosopher interpreting Darwin in 1864— we might have had the opposite, “Survival of the Most Cooperative.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“I asked him if Buddhists believe we all get a specific destiny. “We don’t think there’s a specific place in your life to go. Everybody’s destiny is to become an enlightened being and reach the everlasting state of mind.”
― Po Bronson, What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question

 “A calling is not something you know, it's something you grow into, through trials and mistakes... Attack your fears, rather than shy away from them. Bring what you do in alignment with who you are...Failure's hard, but success at the wrong thing can lock you in forever.”
― Po Bronson, What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question

“From our deepest wounds come our greatest gifts.”

 ― Po Bronson, What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question 

When people start talking about their genealogy I tell them I am part Labrador Retriever because I love water food and people. 

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
― Po Bronson, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

 “Some people are born into their passions. Some never get them and don't care. But I think if you're really struggling to find it - and I think you have, I mean, you've gone all over the country to find it - it's almost certainly for a reason. I think the depth of your struggling is the sign there's something there. Something in you that's trying to get out. People who don't have passions don't struggle.”
― Po Bronson

“Stars don’t just shoot out energy and light. When they’re young, they shoot out amino acids and nucleotides— the raw material of DNA, RNA, and proteins. These are carried by the solar wind throughout the solar system. The building blocks of life come from suns. Earth wasn’t just extremely lucky to have these incredibly elegant Legos here. Early in the formation of a solar system, all the planets get showered with them, especially the rocky planets near the sun. Earth isn’t special.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World