Quote

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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Anne Roiphe
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Two
Secrets
Cannot
Destroying
Persons
Landscape
Fold
Person
Inner
Folds
Without
Share
Liar
Enough
Secret
Liars
Something
Away
Preserve
Always
Others
Preserves

More quotes by 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.
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Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.
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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.
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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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Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.
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
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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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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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We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.
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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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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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Many writers do write about their families and their immediate loved ones and love experiences, either as children or as adults. And very often people get offended by it.
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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I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.
Anne Roiphe
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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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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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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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I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.
Anne Roiphe