Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. The older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Don't waste time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.
In twenty years you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.
Opening day. All you have to do is say the words and you feel the shutters thrown wide, the room air out, the light pour in. In baseball, no other day is so pure with possibility. No scores yet, no losses, no blame or disappointment. No hangover, at least until the game's over.
A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing.
Here's a thing about the death of your mother, or anyone else you love: You can't anticipate how you'll feel afterward. People will tell you; a few may be close to right, none exactly right.
'The Hunger Games' isn't for everybody. But neither is 'Anna Karenina.'
Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you'll have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either of them might run out.
Linda Tripp has shown that a true friend is an archivist, a biographer.