Quote

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

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Anne Roiphe
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Much
Moments
Lover
Else
Insight
Give
Escape
Littles
Lovers
Little
Humanity
Book
Books
Without
Pleasure
Deepening
Giving
Moment
Expecting

More quotes by Anne Roiphe

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Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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We have to recognize that it is a very, very painful thing for people to be exposed to their social community, to be exposed in the world, as not what they would have wanted to be seen as. This is very painful and difficult for people.
Anne Roiphe
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Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.
Anne Roiphe
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You have to have a certain kind of thickening of the hide. I mean, I'm not particularly worried about what other people think. If other people think that I was not the world's most perfect mother, they are completely right.
Anne Roiphe
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It is hard to hold on to friendships when people move away to another state or to another world.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.
Anne Roiphe
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We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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
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Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.
Anne Roiphe
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A person who has no secrets is a liar. We always fold ourselves away from others just enough to preserve a secret or two, something that we cannot share without destroying our inner landscape.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.
Anne Roiphe