24 Quotes by Nancy Mairs

Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

Only after many years will I recognize that I, too, have survived a loss, and not necessarily intact. The depression and multiple sclerosis awaiting me will suggest that changes in the structural level have already occurred by the time I learn to forgive Daddy for abandoning me without even saying good-bye.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you’re increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially, but simultaneously.

I will write myself into well-being.

A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.