Anne Roiphe Quotes
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You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A person who has no secrets is a liar. We always fold ourselves away from others just enough to preserve a secret or two, something that we cannot share without destroying our inner landscape.
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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.
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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.
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One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger.
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We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.
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Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.
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I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.
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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.
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It is hard to hold on to friendships when people move away to another state or to another world.
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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.
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There is cruelty in divorce. There is cruelty in forced or unfortunate marriage. We will continue to cry at weddings because we know how bittersweet, how fragile is the truth. We will always need legal divorce just as an emergency escape hatch is crucial in every submarine. No sense, however, in denying that after every divorce someone will be running like a cat, tin cans tied to its tail: spooked and slowed down.
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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.
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I am not a perfect friend, and it is impossible not to rebuff or be rebuffed if you move about the world.
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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.
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I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.
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You really can't say things that upset someone in print and expect them to be nice and leave you their money. That's just not reasonable.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't really think it comes as a shock to every writer if somebody in their family is mad at them. Yes, it's very upsetting. But it's inherent in the process of trying to make sense of one's life, which is what I think is perhaps at the bottom of writing at all.
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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.
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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.
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People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above.
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Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.
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