I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it. Anne Roiphe More Quotes by Anne Roiphe More Quotes From 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 working-parentswomenmother I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes. Anne Roiphe familydisappointmentsex God is a God of Lovingkindness. Anne Roiphe lovingkindnessgod 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 girlsuccessfulmother 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 daughtermothersweet Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand. Anne Roiphe friendsfriendshiphands Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror. Anne Roiphe mirrorsselffun If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all. Anne Roiphe desertislandsbook 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 mothermeanthinking 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 doewritingart You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note. Anne Roiphe notescreativepeople 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 artistselfthinking I have two writer daughters, and a psychoanalyst daughter, and a lawyer daughter, and they wish we didn't write, I'm sure, but we write. If we were a painting family, we would paint. Anne Roiphe daughterwritingtwo 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 fightingartistthinking When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America. Anne Roiphe hairclassamerica 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 humanitygivingbook 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 choiceswantneeds 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 confusedpainlove-is 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 selfageyears We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors. Anne Roiphe fityouthage
