Top 100 Meghan Daum Quotes

#1. I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #3163
#2. Opinion is dominating, which is absolutely ridiculous - there wouldn't be anything for people to have opinions about if there weren't people out there gathering facts on the ground.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #3324
#3. There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you're only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And that is a complete misuse of the writer's power and unfair to the reader.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #16192
#4. When you talk of not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you're trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #22666
#5. I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #33162
#6. I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #70930
#7. Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings - and when it does, especially without warning, there's rarely anything good on the other end.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #77998
#8. As with 'feminism,' not to mention 'liberalism' and 'conservatism,' 'political correctness' tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #89813
#9. There's more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You'd think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we're going to join.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #133020
#10. When I made my final reckoning with the decision not to have kids, I also decided that I would use at least some of my extra time to better the lives of kids who are already here.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #163543
#11. You don't realize how much a dog's presence defines the contours of your home until, in its absence, the walls seem to relocate themselves.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #198293
#12. My childhood was so inconsistent that I never expected normalcy, and it's enough for me to be able to have time and space to be good to myself and the people around me. Children are nice, but I decided to save myself instead.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #213825
#13. To be honored by success is to take your life seriously. To humble-talk about it is to take yourself seriously.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #259077
#14. For my part, if I'm working while flying, I'm often a bit relieved to be forced to shut down the computer on final descent. But I guess I'm a slacker.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #279496
#15. Not everyone in Santa Monica is a well-heeled, juice-cleansing, Prius-driving yogini, but for better or worse, that is the city's dominant chord.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #302371
#16. What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #369003
#17. The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #409846
#18. People who grew up before the blogosphere, I just think that your brain is wired differently. I feel like in some ways my sensibility is aligned with people twenty years older than me than somebody six years younger. Because there was a sort of cutoff.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #413156
#19. I've always been a late bloomer in some ways, and extremely precocious in other ways. When I was twenty I was living in New York and working a job and could barely bother to be a college student and had my own apartment, but I couldn't possibly get married before I was thirty-nine.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #419144
#20. I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #461858
#21. At some point in my early forties I realized that my primary goal in just about any verbal exchange is to lighten the mood.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #464950
#22. Obviously, nobody chooses not to have kids because they'd rather sleep in late. It's a very visceral decision, and it's a complicated decision.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #476284
#23. In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #477877
#24. In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That's not the general cultural expectation of women.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #483787
#25. Even with men doing more parenting than before, the majority of women are still left facing the well-rehearsed motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it's not a dichotomy; its a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #484890
#26. For my mother's entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #499189
#27. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #515199
#28. I don't confess in my work because to me, that implies that you're dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #552552
#29. As a mentor and an advocate, I've seen no end to the ways that childless people can contribute to the lives and well-being of kids - and adults, for that matter.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #565639
#30. If you do the things you enjoy and are good at, I really have a feeling that that will lead to having a fulfilling life, and people with fulfilling lives are able to be 'good people.'

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #568673
#31. When I talk to students or young writers about the importance of being unafraid to take controversial positions, I'm struck by the degree to which they can't entertain a thought, much less commit one to paper, without imagining the cacophony of snark they'll get in response.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #632509
#32. I loved 'About Schmidt'. I like Alexander Payne's work a lot.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #640180
#33. The truth is that most of your Facebook friends are too busy counting their own 'likes' to pay attention to you for more than a few seconds anyway. Unless you happen to be a kitten who's in love with a baby goat, in which case you should hire a publicist immediately.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #643138
#34. I always tell writers that it's good to have an area of expertise. It's a really practical answer, I know, but know about science or about sports or about medicine, so you can work as a science writer or a sports writer. Don't just know about yourself.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #643915
#35. Distance is not for the fearful, it's for the bold. It's for those who are willing to spend a lot of time alone in exchange for a little time with the one they love. It's for those who know a good thing when they see it, even if they don't see it nearly enough

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #657114
#36. It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #672215
#37. I don't keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I'll send emails to friends, and that's a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I've never been a journal keeper.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #689698
#38. There's a particular kind of single woman whose relationship with her dog has a level of intensity and affection that may be both the cause and the result of her singleness. For a long time, I was that woman.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #699600
#39. Of the countless ways to feel old in your 40s, perhaps none is quite as perplexing as seeing a young person trendily decked out in 1980s-style garb and saying to yourself, 'I can't believe that look is back in style. It was bad enough the first time around!'

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #766350
#40. I just am a person who loves houses. In a way, it's dovetailed into one of the themes of The Unspeakable: Why do you have to change? Why don't you just accept that this is how you are? Why do you have to grow from an experience?

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #779279
#41. As soon as I accepted that I am this kind of writer and I happen to live here, and stopped going to meetings and stopped beating myself up because I wasn't making a ton of money writing for some stupid sitcom, I felt really at home.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #804761
#42. It is important for children to grow up in a world where there are all kinds of adults and role models around them, for them to know it's not just parents and people who are parents that care about them, but that there are people who are living other kinds of lives.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #830354
#43. Self-esteem, the kind that comes from finding the sweet spot between a healthy fondness for yourself and healthy self-skepticism, tends to get harder to come by the older we get.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #847094
#44. To have an old dog is to look into the eyes of the sweetest soul you know and see traces of the early light of the worst day of your life.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #877506
#45. To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #891863
#46. Almost nothing is more tedious than complaining about the weather.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #899272
#47. As humans with egos and feelings, none of us wants to be pilloried. But as thinkers and writers, it's our job to express opinions forthrightly and without qualifying them out of existence.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #954455
#48. In New York the stakes are so high. In urban centers the stakes are so high. You marry the wrong person, you go to the wrong college, you take the wrong job. Any of these things could really get you in trouble down the road. Or in your mind anyway. You're afraid to make any move, it's paralyzing.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #980711
#49. Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #980943
#50. We don't want privacy so much as privacy settings.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #985634
#51. Just as I never liked bumper stickers - even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student - I don't like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1023320
#52. There may well be a few extremists out there somewhere calling for a militant, women-only utopia, but why should this be the definition of 'feminist' when it's already the definition of 'silly'?

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1049721
#53. In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1054470
#54. I have a distinct memory, dating back to 1989 or so, of sitting around with my college dorm mates talking about a new term that was popping up everywhere: 'political correctness.'

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1077365
#55. Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that 'whoosh' sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1080789
#56. Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1085161
#57. Checking email every 45 seconds is not only compulsive, it's presumptuous. It suggests a belief that anyone who sends us a message needs us to read it immediately, even if the message is from SkyMall telling us our Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue has shipped.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1101464
#58. I don't think anyone's ever accused me of too much self-love.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1114992
#59. Before digital and mobile communications effectively tethered us to an invisible, infinite 'wire,' even those with the most hectic schedules were usually willing to answer the phone if they happened to be home when it rang.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1141006
#60. We're not handed situations based on our established likes and dislikes; we get what's available.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1147964
#61. If anything, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1167853
#62. What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1174152
#63. I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1188041
#64. It's about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption - and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1200159
#65. A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1211728
#66. I've always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1223355
#67. If something good happens to you, and no one knows it, did it really happen? Moreover, if you don't publicize your accomplishments and good fortune, are you essentially saying you don't care about them?

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1229780
#68. L.A. is a constellation of microclimates and microcosms, a library with dozens of special collections. A 20-minute drive can bring a temperature change of 15 degrees. Crossing an intersection can feel like crossing a national border.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1232730
#69. People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it's not something that they're up for, and I don't know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1242603
#70. In other words, when women acquire critical skills and starting weighing their options they soon wise up to the fact that they're not getting enough recompense for their labors. In trade union terms, you'd call it a production slowdown ...

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1258903
#71. This whole notion that it's somehow easy and simpler to live in the country is such a fallacy.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1260692
#72. Being taken down a few pegs is humbling. Knowing that life is not easy or fair is humbling. Receiving a great honor - well, that would be called an honor.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1274752
#73. Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1281587
#74. It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1331963
#75. Becoming a parent is always going to be a default setting. I truly believe there will always be more people who want to have children than who don't.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1363011
#76. When I was a teenager, her habit of cramming a bunch of words into one line, plus the way her lyrics tend to start with small particularities and ripple outward into universal truths, lodged itself into my ears and wound up directly on my pages.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1384732
#77. Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally - and sometimes maddeningly - who we are.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1416769
#78. Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1417295
#79. Also, I was coming up on my five year anniversary of owning the house, and if there's anything I've learned in five years, it's this: if a piece of your house falls off and you don't know what to do with it, throwing it in the trash and forgetting about it is a perfectly viable option.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1419687
#80. I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1442041
#81. But a dog confers status on a man. It shows he is responsible and capable of love. It will probably even help him get laid.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1455637
#82. Air travelers, of course, are famous for their hubris. They carry on too many bags and use the restroom when the seat-belt sign is on.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1455691
#83. I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1457797
#84. It's not that I don't get on bandwagons; I just climb aboard only after most of the band has packed up and left for the next gig.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1471238
#85. Though I probably shouldn't admit this, the activities and pursuits in which I've achieved any measure of success are, without exception, activities and pursuits that came easily to me from the beginning.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1478052
#86. If the desire to have children is just a way to build some noisy tribe of distraction around oneself, then I'd rather be alone.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1492878
#87. Self-righteousness, when you think about it, is a contra-indicator of self-esteem. It's what sets in when genuine righteousness eludes us.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1539308
#88. I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1542681
#89. Cooking fills me with a dread I can only describe as the sum total of every negative feeling I've ever had about myself. It takes my chronic impatience, divides it by my inherent laziness, and multiplies it to the power of my deepest self-loathing.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1558093
#90. Our culture is so obsessed with the idea that you're going to go through a crisis or some difficult event and come out the other side a changed or improved person, and I just think that if you're honest, that often does not happen, and in fact, it shouldn't happen.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1599238
#91. In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1601327
#92. Other dogs may do their jobs in their own unique and perfectly wonderful ways, but there will always be that dog that no dog will replace, the dog that will make you cry even when it's been gone for more years than it could ever have lived.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1610329
#93. In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1612247
#94. A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1640259
#95. Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1646283
#96. Posting a brag, humble or otherwise, and then waiting for people to respond is the equivalent of having a conversation in which all you do is wait for your turn to speak.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1701573
#97. For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1715272
#98. Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1818793
#99. I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1849050
#100. If you must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn't grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt.

Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum Quotes #1862375

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top