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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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Anne Roiphe
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Kind
Worried
Think
Particularly
Thinking
Completely
World
Perfect
People
Mother
Certain
Right
Thickening
Mean
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More quotes by Anne Roiphe

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You need your freedom. You need to be able to do what you want to do as a journalist, as a person who's speaking for other women as you speak for yourself, and you make a choice. You have to be tough enough to take the consequences of that choice.
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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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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God is a God of Lovingkindness.
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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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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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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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 feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.
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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Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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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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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I am not a perfect friend, and it is impossible not to rebuff or be rebuffed if you move about the world.
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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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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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