Nancy Mairs Quotes

#1. The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

Nancy Mairs

#2. My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

Nancy Mairs

#3. In the grammar of the phallus
the I, I, I
[woman] can't utter female experience.

Nancy Mairs

#4. If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

Nancy Mairs

#5. Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

Nancy Mairs

#6. Physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

Nancy Mairs

#7. A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.

Nancy Mairs

#8. Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law.

Nancy Mairs

#9. I will write myself into well-being.

Nancy Mairs

#10. People who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn't half so dismal as they assume.

Nancy Mairs

#11. This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period.

Nancy Mairs

#12. Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

Nancy Mairs

#13. No one expects all impediments to be miraculously whisked away. In insisting that others view our lives as ample and precious, we are not demanding that they be made perfect ... If it is both possible and pleasant for me and my kind to enter, the world will become a livelier place. You'll see.

Nancy Mairs

#14. God is no White Knight who charges into the world to pluck us like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases. God chooses to become present to and through us. It is up to us to rescue one another.

Nancy Mairs

#15. Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

Nancy Mairs

#16. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

Nancy Mairs

#17. That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.

Nancy Mairs

#18. God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.

Nancy Mairs

#19. In a society that prates about, but seldom practices, communication, the craving to be listened to, heard, understood - which originates with the first terrified wail, the circling arms, the breast, the consolatory murmur - is hard to assuage.

Nancy Mairs

#20. One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.

Nancy Mairs

#21. From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

Nancy Mairs

#22. You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it.

Nancy Mairs

#23. To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially, but simultaneously.

Nancy Mairs

#24. If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have some idea what to do with them.

Nancy Mairs

#25. Our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

Nancy Mairs

#26. Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive." And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: "Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely."

Nancy Mairs