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

When Salter was fifty-five, his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Allan, died in an electrical accident. She was in the shower in a cabin next door to his in Aspen. He walked in and found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. He carried her dead body in his arms. He took her outside and tried to resuscitate her, somehow thinking she was drowning. We do not talk about this. He says only, There was the wreckage of that. ~ Katie 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

She once complained that her stories were like 'birds bred in cages,' but that concentrated atmosphere, that claustrophobic hothouse of emotion, was her talent. Her stories were little masterpieces of compression: she succinctly contained whole lifetimes in a few pages, every moment loaded with as much as it could bear. ~ Katie 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

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent's Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed. ~ Katie 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

In spite of its romantic frisson, the position of muse is very vague and largely thankless for the muse herself. ~ Katie 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

The Paradox: how do you lose something you never had?
The answer: There was another way to have. A transparent stretch of space between you. To love from a distance, through that space, more deeply, more colourfully, so it can be seen from faraway like a flag. Eventually the spave itself fills you. The air entering your body and replacing your blood, running through you. The halfßpleasant feeling of not being here. ~ Katie 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

The poet found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function, for his radical abdication of responsibilities. Illness offered, for decades, a comfortable way for him to think about himself. Ever the poet, he pretty much set up camp and lived in the metaphor of being sick. ~ Katie 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

Facebook is the novel we are all writing ~ Katie Roiphe

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