Anne Roiphe Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.”
-- 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 -
“Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.”
-- 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 -
“You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.”
-- Anne Roiphe -
“It is hard to hold on to friendships when people move away to another state or to another world.”
-- Anne Roiphe -
“Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.”
-- Anne Roiphe -
“Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.”
-- Anne 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- 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 -
“Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.”
-- Anne 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Anne Roiphe
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