Anne Roiphe Quotes

A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.

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.

People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above.

I am not a perfect friend, and it is impossible not to rebuff or be rebuffed if you move about the world.

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.

Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.

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.

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.

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.

I would prefer you not to say, "That was the most terribly written piece I've ever read." That would hurt me. But you don't think I'm the best person in the world? Well, alright.

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.

I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.

What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.

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.

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.

Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.

I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.

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.

It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.

You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.

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.

God is a God of Lovingkindness.

Is it possible that my sons-in-law will do toilets? If we raise boys to know that diapers need to be changed and refrigerators need to be cleaned, there's hope for the next generation.

It is hard to hold on to friendships when people move away to another state or to another world.

One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger.

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.

I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.