Anne Roiphe Quotes

Silence in the shell of a city, no baby crying, no car honking, no ambulance shrieking, no lovers moaning, no drunks throwing up in the alley, no lights, nothing but wind and rain and snow in its season and rust and a rattling of open doors and carcass smell. It was a possibility like a brain tumor or a scorpion bite. ~ Anne Roiphe

I am not a perfect friend, and it is impossible not to rebuff or be rebuffed if you move about the world. ~ Anne Roiphe

My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good. ~ Anne Roiphe

I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it. ~ Anne Roiphe

Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies. ~ Anne Roiphe

I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes. ~ Anne Roiphe

You have to have a certain kind of thickening of the hide. I mean, I'm not particularly worried about what other people think. If other people think that I was not the world's most perfect mother, they are completely right. ~ Anne Roiphe

Sometimes what we call love is just a settling of old scores, or a seeking of forbidden pain, or a circuitous path to the kingdom of cruelty, or she may simply have confused lack of capital with heroism while searching for rescue without knowing from what. ~ Anne Roiphe

They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead. ~ Anne Roiphe

Decay is quiet but ghastly, explosion is dramatic and dreadful. There's not much to choose between the two of them in reality, and most of our lives have sufficient of both. ~ Anne Roiphe

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does. ~ Anne Roiphe

We have to recognize that it is a very, very painful thing for people to be exposed to their social community, to be exposed in the world, as not what they would have wanted to be seen as. This is very painful and difficult for people. ~ Anne Roiphe

I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules. ~ Anne Roiphe

People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above. ~ Anne Roiphe

People always think their world is coming to an end if they're exposed, and of course it isn't coming to an end; it goes right on exactly the way it always was. ~ Anne Roiphe

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life. ~ Anne Roiphe

I believe that it is our human right to be parents and women. And there's no contradiction between feminism, which means women should have all that they are entitled to, all that they can do, all the opportunities that they can take advantage of they should have. ~ Anne Roiphe

What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter. ~ Anne Roiphe

I think it is a good thing to have woman friends at every stage of life. We confide in each other, we support each other, we understand each other most of the time. Of course, sometimes we are competitive or angry or distant, too. But I do think it is important not to let the main friendships slip away in the sweep of the days. ~ Anne Roiphe

A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears. ~ Anne Roiphe

However, there probably is a slight connection between the high-wire, super sensitivity, open to everything and too much, and slightly fragile soul of the artist and the need to self-medicate, which can lead to bad trouble either in drugs, or alcohol. So it's not that there's no connection, it's just that we can't make too much of it because it isn't the addiction that's the issue, it's the fragility of some people who do artistic work, who end up in rehab somewhere or other. ~ Anne Roiphe

How deep is our desire to do better than our mothers
to bring daughters into adulthood strong and fierce yet loving and gentle, adventurous and competitive but still nurturing and friendly, sweet yet sharp. We know as working women that we can't quite have it all, but that hasn't stopped us from wanting it all for them. ~ Anne Roiphe

Our mythology tells us so much about fathers and sons ... What do we know about mothers and daughters? ... Our power is so oblique, so hidden, so ethereal a matter, that we rarely struggle with our daughters over actual kingdoms or corporate shares. On the other hand, our attractiveness dries as theirs blooms, our journey shortens just as theirs begins. We too must be afraid and awed and amazed that we cannot live forever and that our replacements are eager for their turn, indifferent to our wishes, ready to leave us behind. ~ Anne Roiphe

Many writers do write about their families and their immediate loved ones and love experiences, either as children or as adults. And very often people get offended by it. ~ Anne Roiphe

One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger. ~ Anne Roiphe

Most of us don't have mothers who blazed a trail for us
at least, not all the way. Coming of age before or during the inception of the women's movement, whether as working parents or homemakers, whether married or divorced, our mothers faced conundrums
what should they be? how should they act?
that became our uncertainties. ~ Anne Roiphe

God is a God of Lovingkindness. ~ Anne Roiphe

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else. ~ Anne Roiphe

I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents. ~ Anne Roiphe

You need your freedom. You need to be able to do what you want to do as a journalist, as a person who's speaking for other women as you speak for yourself, and you make a choice. You have to be tough enough to take the consequences of that choice. ~ Anne Roiphe

We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors. ~ Anne Roiphe

We were not always 70, or rather our 70 is an accumulation of all the other ways we were. Our 5-year-old selves became our 10-year-old selves, and so on and on; and if we unpack our selves, the full album appears. Every moment is a part of the following moment, and we are all a continuum. ~ Anne Roiphe

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be. ~ Anne Roiphe

Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people. ~ Anne Roiphe

If someone is counting on children to bring them peace of mind, self-confidence, or a steady sense of happiness, they are in for a bad shock. What children do is complicate, implicate, give plot lines to the story, color to the picture, darken everything, bring fear as never before, suggest the holy, explain the ferocity of the human mind, undo or redo some of the past while casting shadows into the future. There is no boredom with children in the home. The risks are high. The voltage crackling. - Anne Roiphe, Married ~ Esther Perel

Is it possible that my sons-in-law will do toilets? If we raise boys to know that diapers need to be changed and refrigerators need to be cleaned, there's hope for the next generation. ~ Anne Roiphe

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror. ~ Anne Roiphe

Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives? ~ Anne Tyler

Evil is anything that goes against life, harms life, stifles life, destroys life. Evil is bringing harm to another person, inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, or confusion. All evil comes from this. This is the root of all evil. ~ Anne Rice

Jennifer Anne had prepared some complicated-looking recipe involving chicken breasts stuffed with sweet potatoes topped with a vegetable glaze. They looked perfect, but it was the kind of dish where you just knew someone had to have been pawing at your food for a long while to get it just right, their fingers all in what now you were having to stick in your mouth. ~ Sarah Dessen

Tell me I can marry Anne Frank's skeleton. ~ Cameron Pierce

For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love. ~ Anne Garréta

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne
I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them ... But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Women have shown that they truly can do anything. But the statistics are strikingly different for women with children. When a woman has her first child, the wage gap between men and women opens. David Leonhardt of The Atlantic argues that the real problem in the workplace isn't sexism, it's momism, because women do great in the workplace until they have kids. Why? In a nutshell, when forced to choose between family and work, women choose family. And in the past, women were forced to make this choice. ~ Anne Bogel

Oh, Miss Shirley, can you smell the apple-blossom fragrance?" Having a nose, Anne could. ~ L.M. Montgomery

MEGARA
Wait for worse? You love the light so much?

AMPHITRYON
I do, I love its hopes. ~ Anne Carson

Kugel had discovered of late that he was gluten intolerant ... It was difficult to avoid wheat, and gluten-free food was terribly expensive, but Kugel now thought it wonderfully appropriate that matzoh - the most hated food of his youth - was the one he, as an adult, would find he was allergic to, the one that his body was actually incapable of processing, the one that the lining of his gut identified as poison.
His stomach was anti-Semitic.
His bowels had assimilated.
His rectum was self-hating.
Anne Frank would be pleased.
His mother would be disappointed. ~ Shalom Auslander

You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained, everything important to other kids. they said, 'Look, you're human, you're going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, nad have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of that fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life.' And then they told the cildren who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don't know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.
But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise you gorw up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others so no one will know that you weren't there the day the instructions were passed out. ~ Anne Lamott

I wasn't a stranger to dealing with thirty-plus-year-old adolescents ~ Terri Anne Browning

No, I'm not afraid, except when it comes to things about myself, but I'm working on that. ~ Anne Frank

I knew I'd conquered America when Mike Tyson told me I was one mean lady. ~ Anne Robinson

Believe in angels? Then believe in vampires. Believe in me. There are worse things on earth. ~ Anne Rice

Despair

Who is he?
A railroad track toward hell?
Breaking like a stick of furniture?
The hope that suddenly overflows the cesspool?
The love that goes down the drain like spit?
The love that said forever, forever
and then runs you over like a truck?
Are you a prayer that floats into a radio advertisement?
Despair,
I don't like you very well.
You don't suit my clothes or my cigarettes.
Why do you locate here
as large as a tank,
aiming at one half of a lifetime?
Couldn't you just go float into a tree
instead of locating here at my roots,
forcing me out of the life I've led
when it's been my belly so long?

All right!
I'll take you along on the trip
where for so many years
my arms have been speechless ~ Anne Sexton

Given in love. Defiled by remorse. ~ Tracy Anne Warren

Delicious it was, the hatred between us, or so I thought. Such unfamiliar excitement, to have him there to ridicule and despise. ~ Anne Rice

Over my lifetime, women have demonstrated repeatedly that they can do anything that men can do, while still managing traditional women's work at the same time. But the same expansion of roles has not been available to men. ~ Anne-Marie Slaughter

How do you go on breathing and moving and doing things when you know there is no explanation? ~ Anne Rice

Oh sharp diamond, my mother!
I could not count the cost
of all your faces, your moods
that present that I lost.
Sweet girl, my deathbed,
my jewel-fingered lady ... ~ Anne Sexton

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be. ~ Anne Enright

The fever lit on the town of Loughgillan like a flock of Death's own crows, at first perching wherever their talons could grip easily--upon the very old and the very young. And then, the birds seemed to settle anywhere and everywhere. ~ Carrie Anne Noble

Her hand shot out, gripped his arm. "M.J. and Bailey?"
"Your friends are fine." He felt her grip go limp. "They've had an eventful holiday weekend, all of which could have been avoided if they'd contacted and cooperated with the police. And it's cooperation I'll have from you now, one way or the other."
She tossed her hair back. "Where are they? What did you do,toss them in a cell? My lawyer will have them out and your butt in a sling before you can finish reciting the Miranda." She started toward the phone, saw it wasn't on the Queen Anne table.
"No,they're not in a cell." It goaded him, the way she snapped into gear, ready to buck the rules. "I imagine they're planning your funeral right about now. ~ Nora Roberts

But was talking aloud allowed? ~ Anne Enright

I tell you these massacres have to come. They have to. There's bad dudes selling the Blood. Can you believe? Selling the Blood. Least they were. I expect they're played out too and running for their lives now like everybody else. ~ Anne Rice

Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it. ~ Anne O'Hare McCormick

Jenny looked, as usual, elegant and as fine-drawn as a young doe, but oddly muted, as if she had been outlined in sepia. ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

Rider to your mate be true
Follow heart in deed and do
All the best your strength can find
So you will rest in heart and mind ~ Anne McCaffrey

I wanted none of it finally. And, deserving nothing better, I closed up like a spider in the flame of a match. And even Armand who was my constant companion, and my only companion, existed at a great distance from me, beyond that veil which separated me from all living things, a veil which was a form of shroud. ~ Anne Rice

God, why didn't you make us all dogs? ~ Anne Rice

I have never, for a single moment, been aware of pressure from anyone in television about how I dress, what my shape is or how I speak. I've always written my own scripts. I've always been the first to point out that I need to be fit. I need to look good. ~ Anne Robinson

Captivating to men, Anne was also sharp, assertive, subtle, calculating, vindictive, a power dresser and a power player, perhaps a figure to be more admired than liked. ~ Eric Ives

The stone bench is gray. The grass is gray. My life is dirty gray ~ Julie Anne Peters

He couldn't have known. The moonlight wasn't enough to illuminate the room, and the tears that spilled silently down her cheeks didn't touch him. But suddenly the kiss softened, the hands gentled on her, the lips coaxed and teased and healed. And without any more thought she was kissing him back, reaching for him with her mouth while her hands were held back, seeking him out with her tongue, calling him to her in the only way she could. ~ Anne Stuart

No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination. ~ Anne Sullivan

Muslim women, and critics, male and female, of Western models of sex and sexuality, are silenced. The price of speech for a Muslim woman in the West is the disavowal of Islam. Books condemning Islam are picked by publishers and featured on talk shows. Their authors are commended for their courage. Speech in defense of Islam is read as the speech of subjection. Islam oppresses women. Any woman speaking in its favor must be deluded or forced to speak against her will. If she defends the hijab or speaks in defense of polygamy, she cannot be believed. No woman in her right mind could defend these. Any woman who does must be deluded or coerced. The more Muslim women object to Western efforts to "help" them, the more need there is to liberate them. ~ Anne Norton

Just place one foot in front of the other and remember that tomorrow is a new day. ~ Melody Anne

I've found that there is always some beauty left
in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. ~ Anne Frank