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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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Anne Roiphe
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Days
Age
Many
Indoors
Flashed
Feathers
Fit
Youth
Stay

More quotes by Anne Roiphe

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People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.
Anne Roiphe
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Decay is quiet but ghastly, explosion is dramatic and dreadful. There's not much to choose between the two of them in reality, and most of our lives have sufficient of both.
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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How deep is our desire to do better than our mothers--to bring daughters into adulthood strong and fierce yet loving and gentle, adventurous and competitive but still nurturing and friendly, sweet yet sharp. We know as working women that we can't quite have it all, but that hasn't stopped us from wanting it all for them.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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
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Most of us don't have mothers who blazed a trail for us--at least, not all the way. Coming of age before or during the inception of the women's movement, whether as working parents or homemakers, whether married or divorced, our mothers faced conundrums--what should they be? how should they act?--that became our uncertainties.
Anne Roiphe
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I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.
Anne Roiphe
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Is it possible that my sons-in-law will do toilets? If we raise boys to know that diapers need to be changed and refrigerators need to be cleaned, there's hope for the next generation.
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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Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.
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
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You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.
Anne Roiphe
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I think it is a good thing to have woman friends at every stage of life. We confide in each other, we support each other, we understand each other most of the time. Of course, sometimes we are competitive or angry or distant, too. But I do think it is important not to let the main friendships slip away in the sweep of the days.
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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A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.
Anne Roiphe