Nancy Mairs > Quotes

“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.”
― Nancy Mairs

“Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.”
― Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer

“In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.”
― Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer

“I'm only as brave as I have to be . . . and I do not want to have to be this brave.”
― Nancy Mairs, Carnal Acts

“The capacity to dream beyond the facts of existence into their significance enables us to remember a true past, one that simultaneously reflects and illuminates experience.”
― Nancy Mairs, Remembering The Bone House

“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.”
― Nancy Mairs, Remembering The Bone House

“No more Gifted Girl with Lots of Potential. No more grandiose intentions of being a writer when I grow up, never realized because the products never come right and so I'm safer to sit than to start the inevitable failure. This is all the grown up I get to be. No more "dream" world, more perfect than the "real" world, waiting if only I can find the small golden key: in which I love and rear my children without pain; in which I gratify my husband's slenderest desire; in which I dust all the surfaces in my room every morning instead of at Christmas and Easter; in which I understood how to solve a basic quadratic equation; in which someone discovers all the poems I haven't written and publishes them in The New Yorker. There is one world--this world--and I made it. No hope of a cure, ever, for being me.
In many ways these recognitions have been freeing. In my mushy adolescent meditation on "the border between this & that," for instance, I wrote that "more than carrying that into this, to gape at, but never touch, I want that to be this, so that my dreams are tangible, so that I must not live always in my mind, existing only in my body. I want to unite my mind with my body to be whole." Now that I know that the border I perceived was, like any border, an arbitrary political line inked across the geography of existence, I spend my mornings writing essays, then turn without disruption to the other tasks of inscribing a life. None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I'll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done. Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Nancy Mairs, Plaintext: Essays

“Thanks to World War II, I am a native Californian, an incongruity that perhaps troubles only a thirteenth generation New Englander. Growing up among relatives whose roots proudly clutch thin and rocky soil, I'membarrassed to have been born in California, as though I hadn't got properly born at all.”
― Nancy Mairs, Remembering The Bone House

“No more Gifted Girl with Lots of Potential. No more grandiose intentions of being a writer when I grow up, never realized because the products never come right and so I'm safer to sit than to start the inevitable failure. This is all the grown up I get to be. No more "dream" world, more perfect than the "real" world, waiting if only I can find the small golden key: in which I love and rear my children without pain; in which I gratify my husband's slenderest desire; in which I dust all the surfaces in my room every morning instead of at Christmas and Easter; in which I understood how to solve a basic quadratic equation; in which someone discovers all the poems I haven't written and publishes them in The New Yorker. There is one world--this world--and I made it. No hope of a cure, ever, for being me.
In many ways these recognitions have been freeing. In my mushy adolescent meditation on "the border between this & that," for instance, I wrote that "more than carrying that into this, to gape at, but never touch, I want that to be this, so that my dreams are tangible, so that I must not live always in my mind, existing only in my body. I want to unite my mind with my body to be whole." Now that I know that the border I perceived was, like any border, an arbitrary political line inked across the geography of existence, I spend my mornings writing essays, then turn without disruption to other tasks of inscribing a life. None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I'll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done. Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Nancy Mairs, Plaintext: Essays

“Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Nancy Mairs, Plaintext: Essays

“Shamelessness, like shame, is not a masculine condition. That is, there is no shameless man as there is a shameless woman or, as my grandmother used to say, a shameless hussy. A man without shame is in general assumed to simply have done nothing he need feel guilty about. A woman without shame is a strumpet, a trollop, a whore, a witch. These connotations have been immemorially sexual....My sexuality has been the single most powerful disruptive force mankind has ever perceived, and its repression has been the work of centuries.”
― Nancy Mairs