Mary Pipher Quotes

#1. She said, Let's face it, the world isn't exactly waiting for girls like me.

Mary Pipher

#2. All feelings are acceptable, but all behavior isn't.

Mary Pipher

#3. Traditionally parents have wondered what their teens were doing, but now teens are much more likely to be doing things that can get them killed.

Mary Pipher

#4. Most parents of adolescent girls have the goal of keeping their daughters safe while they grow up and explore the world. The parents' job is to protect, the daughter's job is to explore.

Mary Pipher

#5. The fullness of life comes from an identity built on giving and on joy.

Mary Pipher

#6. Intelligent resistance keeps the true self alive

Mary Pipher

#7. By high school, some girls may be mature enough to be sexually active, but my experience is that the more mature and healthy girls avoid sex.

Mary Pipher

#8. When one of us tells the truth, he makes it easier for all of us to open our hearts to our pain and that of others.

Mary Pipher

#9. In all the years I've been a therapist, I've yet to meet one girl who likes her body.

Mary Pipher

#10. At thirteen, I thought more about my acne than I did about God or world peace. At thirteen, many girls spend more time in front of a mirror than they do on their studies. Small flaws become obsessions. Bad hair can ruin a day. A broken fingernail can feel tragic.

Mary Pipher

#11. The two most radical things you can do in America are to slow down, and to talk to each other. If you do these things, you will improve your country.

Mary Pipher

#12. Authenticity is an "owning" of all experience, including emotions and thoughts that are not socially acceptable.

Mary Pipher

#13. I'm a perfectly good carrot that everyone is trying to turn into a rose. As a carrot, I have good color and a nice leafy top. When I'm carved into a rose, I turn brown and wither.

Mary Pipher

#14. Telling stories never fails to produce good in the universe.

Mary Pipher

#15. Real friends require honesty, openness, and even vulnerability. They also require attention and simple acts of kindness.

Mary Pipher

#16. Coming out of the trance of denial is painful. But crises offer us opportunities to rethink our lives. The best thing about despair is that it wakes us up. We can see the world more clearly and open to new possibilities ... And we can find new joy in the ordinary.

Mary Pipher

#17. All five hundred boys want to go out with the same ten anorexic girls." She said, "I'm a good musician, but not many guys are looking for a girl that plays great Bach preludes.

Mary Pipher

#18. Being fat means being left out, scorned, and vilified.

Mary Pipher

#19. I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don't know your history, if you don't know your family, who are you?

Mary Pipher

#20. The protected place in space and time that we once called childhood has grown shorter.

Mary Pipher

#21. It's important for parents to watch for trouble and convey to their daughters that, if it comes, they are strong enough to deal with it. Parents who send their [adolescent] daughters the message that they'll be overwhelmed by problems aren't likely to hear what's really happening.

Mary Pipher

#22. With meditation I found a ledge above the waterfall of my thoughts.

Mary Pipher

#23. The battle for popularity is won, but the war for respect as a whole person is lost.

Mary Pipher

#24. We tend to value military heroes and Schwarzenegger types who are physically courageous. The heroics of doing the right thing every day even when it is dull and inconvenient are undervalued.

Mary Pipher

#25. Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

Mary Pipher

#26. True freedom has more to do with following the North Star than going whichever way the wind blows. Sometimes it seems like freedom is blowing with the winds of the day, but that kind of freedom is really an illusion. It turns your boat in circles. Freedom is sailing toward your dreams.

Mary Pipher

#27. Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

Mary Pipher

#28. When I speak to classes, I ask any woman in the audience who feels good about her body to come up afterward. I want to hear about her success experience. I have yet to have a woman come up.

Mary Pipher

#29. All geniuses born women are lost to the public good.

Mary Pipher

#30. It's virtually impossible in America to be heavy and feel good about oneself.

Mary Pipher

#31. Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn't obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.

Mary Pipher

#32. Therapy isn't Radio.We don't need to constantly fill the air with sounds. Sometimes, when its quite, surprising things happen.

Mary Pipher

#33. I want to write. I have always wanted to write. I do not care it I am not good at it. I just want to try.

Mary Pipher

#34. Teenage girls engage in emotional reasoning, which is the belief that if you feel something is true, it must be true. If a teenager feels like a nerd, she is a nerd ... There is a limited ability to sort facts from feelings. Thinking is still magical in the sense that thinking something makes it so.

Mary Pipher

#35. America today limits girls' development, truncates their wholeness and leaves many of them traumatized.

Mary Pipher

#36. One important reason to stay calm is that calm parents hear more. Low-key, accepting parents are the ones whose children keep talking.

Mary Pipher

#37. We are a small, interconnected world; that we are all safe or none of us are; that we are all well cared for or all at risk.

Mary Pipher

#38. Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger.

Mary Pipher

#39. Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.

Mary Pipher

#40. Simone de Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects. They do not suffer from the penis envy Freud postulated, but from power envy.

Mary Pipher