Lots Of Candles, Plenty Of Cake Quotes
"First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented. And finally I was what I was again."
"Sometimes people would suggest I must have been eavesdropping in their living rooms."
"Books and poetry and essays make us feel as though we’re connected, as though the thoughts and feelings we believe are singular and sometimes nutty are shared by others."
"Life must be lived forward but understood backward."
"I would tell my younger self that she should stop listening to anyone who wanted to smack her down, that she was smart enough, resourceful and hardworking enough, pretty terrific in general."
"Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions."
"I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street."
"The older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us—and love us despite what they know about us—are the joists that hold up the house of our existence."
"I’m part of the generation that said it wanted to change the world, and it did."
"We all have a list of bad things that can happen, dark roads we can wander down."
"Life is full of close calls, jobs that seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect would have been a bust."
"Being smart about life, and about ourselves, means that we know that it wasn’t that we were savvy, or strategic; sometimes we just lucked out."
"The illusion of control is the besetting addiction, and delusion, of the modern age."
"The truth is that if I’d gone to AA meetings, I wouldn’t have had very much to say."
"Sometimes it’s marrying someone, sometimes divorcing them."
"Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry."
"It’s not insignificant, the number of people who have said to me over the years, 'My mother had a drinking problem.'"
"We often think of turning points as monumental events, but in retrospect they are so often minor moments."
"Kind and loving and always available with pepper-onion-and-egg sandwiches with melted mozzarella cheese. Who could ask for more?"
"The idea that kind and loving is enough is a tough sell in our current culture."
"A perfect storm of trends and events contributed to this."
"Little minds, we learned from researchers, were infinitely malleable, even before birth."
"Keeping up with the Joneses turned into keeping up with the Joneses’ kids."
"My first sitter was the erstwhile manager of a cult punk band."
"A lot of this oversight was not particularly good for kids, either."
"You can’t learn from mistakes and disappointments if your childhood is engineered so there aren’t any."
"I processed this remarkable and deeply troubling phenomenon in two ways."
"The essential questions are much more cosmic, more critical, more terrifying."
"It’s all in the calibrations over the long haul."
"We are the first generation of women who are intimately involved in the lives of our children and in the lives of our parents."
"The irony is rich—the women’s movement taught us we could be more than caregivers, and now we’re caregivers to more people than ever before."
"Because of all that we’ve learned and all that we can do, we may be the first generation of human beings who try to deny our own mortality."
"Never has man’s helplessness in the face of death been more pitiable than in this age when he can do everything except escape death."
"If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have done all those sit-ups."
"The light at the end of the tunnel, as the poet Robert Lowell once wrote, is the light of an oncoming train."
"My mother thought her death would enrich my writing, and I’m ashamed to say that she was correct in that."
"Motherhood, and loss. That’s what I write about most often."
"Life was short, and therefore it made me both driven and joyful."
"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?"
"I don’t even really count for these children yet. If I die tomorrow they will have nothing but other people’s stories where a mother ought to be."
"I’m elated to have what the actress Laura Linney called 'the privilege of aging.'"
"Perhaps it is because of having seen a person die, that shocking moment when an individual becomes essentially an object."
"The better place is that spot on the highway when you can suddenly see New York City strung like a necklace of jagged diamonds."
"There are some things that are deep inside me now, chemical, biological: The way my head swivels when a little voice cries, 'Mommy!' in a crowded supermarket."