145 Quotes by Meghan Daum

My goal in life is to be content. By that I don’t mean “fine” or “basically satisfied.” I don’t mean settling. I mean, for last of better terms, feeling like I’m in the right life.

There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you’re only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And that is a complete misuse of the writer’s power and unfair to the reader.

It terrifies me to admit to a firsthand understanding of the way the heart and the ego are entwined. Like diseased trees that have folded in on one another, our need to worship fuses with our need to be worshipped.

The path of least resistance has a lot going for it. The comfort zone isn’t where you lose yourself. It’s where you find yourself.

To have an old dog is to look into the eyes of the sweetest soul you know and see traces of the early light of the worst day of your life.

What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that’s such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing.

As soon as I accepted that I am this kind of writer and I happen to live here, and stopped going to meetings and stopped beating myself up because I wasn’t making a ton of money writing for some stupid sitcom, I felt really at home.

It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption – and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.

Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally – and sometimes maddeningly – who we are.