Nancy Mairs Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

Nancy Mairs
In a society that prates about, but seldom practices, communication, the craving to be listened to, heard, understood - which originates with the first terrified wail, the circling arms, the breast, the consolatory murmur - is hard to assuage.

Nancy Mairs
If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

Nancy Mairs
Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

Nancy Mairs
That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.

Nancy Mairs
From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

Nancy Mairs
This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period.

Nancy Mairs
One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.

Nancy Mairs
Physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

Nancy Mairs
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

Nancy Mairs
Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

Nancy Mairs
To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously.

Nancy Mairs
No one expects all impediments to be miraculously whisked away. In insisting that others view our lives as ample and precious, we are not demanding that they be made perfect.... If it is both possible and pleasant for me and my kind to enter, the world will become a livelier place. You'll see.

Nancy Mairs
My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

Nancy Mairs
The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

Nancy Mairs
People who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn't half so dismal as they assume.

Nancy Mairs
If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have some idea what to do with them.

Nancy Mairs