Quote

When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.

Anne Roiphe

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Roiphe
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Class
Symbolic
Looking
Ruling
Everyone
Dominant
Else
Straight
America
Meant
Look
Needed
Looks
Hair
Like
Grew
Needing

More quotes by Anne Roiphe

Image
I don't really think it comes as a shock to every writer if somebody in their family is mad at them. Yes, it's very upsetting. But it's inherent in the process of trying to make sense of one's life, which is what I think is perhaps at the bottom of writing at all.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Sometimes what we call love is just a settling of old scores, or a seeking of forbidden pain, or a circuitous path to the kingdom of cruelty, or she may simply have confused lack of capital with heroism while searching for rescue without knowing from what.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I believe that it is our human right to be parents and women. And there's no contradiction between feminism, which means women should have all that they are entitled to, all that they can do, all the opportunities that they can take advantage of they should have.
Anne Roiphe
Image
We were not always 70, or rather our 70 is an accumulation of all the other ways we were. Our 5-year-old selves became our 10-year-old selves, and so on and on and if we unpack our selves, the full album appears. Every moment is a part of the following moment, and we are all a continuum.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
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.
Anne Roiphe
Image
One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger.
Anne Roiphe