Top 55 Meghan Daum Quotes

When I talk to students or young writers about the importance of being unafraid to take controversial positions, I’m struck by the degree to which they can’t entertain a thought, much less commit one to paper, without imagining the cacophony of snark they’ll get in response.

Non-fiction about personal subjects is going to attract more user comments than a foreign correspondent writing from Syria – unfortunately.

I’ve always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences.

I work really hard not to have a kitsch tone to any of my work, particularly radio stuff, which sometimes goes in that direction on certain programs.

Let’s face it: every campus has its share of students who can’t quite comprehend that extreme political correctness is often born of the same intolerance and anti-intellectualism as standard-issue bigotry.

It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.

Though I probably shouldn’t admit this, the activities and pursuits in which I’ve achieved any measure of success are, without exception, activities and pursuits that came easily to me from the beginning.

Self-righteousness, when you think about it, is a contra-indicator of self-esteem. It’s what sets in when genuine righteousness eludes us.

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn’t occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn’t a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

It’s not that I don’t get on bandwagons; I just climb aboard only after most of the band has packed up and left for the next gig.

My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions.

I don’t confess in my work because to me, that implies that you’re dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you.

Self-esteem, the kind that comes from finding the sweet spot between a healthy fondness for yourself and healthy self-skepticism, tends to get harder to come by the older we get.

For my part, if I’m working while flying, I’m often a bit relieved to be forced to shut down the computer on final descent. But I guess I’m a slacker.

I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept.

As a mentor and an advocate, I’ve seen no end to the ways that childless people can contribute to the lives and well-being of kids – and adults, for that matter.

I loved Woody Allen’s short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.

Few targets of ridicule are as easy to hit as owners and handlers of competitive show dogs.

The truth is that most of your Facebook friends are too busy counting their own ‘likes’ to pay attention to you for more than a few seconds anyway. Unless you happen to be a kitten who’s in love with a baby goat, in which case you should hire a publicist immediately.

Mother’s Day, like motherhood itself, is fraught with peril. There are so many ways to get it wrong, so many opportunities to disappoint and be disappointed.

In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That’s not the general cultural expectation of women.

What I think is important about essayists – about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view – is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way.

We use our gadgets for distraction and entertainment. We use them to avoid work while giving the impression that we’re actually working hard.

I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.

I loved ‘About Schmidt’. I like Alexander Payne’s work a lot.

Social media, despite its reputation as the ultimate agent of self-promotion, actually feeds on self-loathing.

When I made my final reckoning with the decision not to have kids, I also decided that I would use at least some of my extra time to better the lives of kids who are already here.

As with ‘feminism,’ not to mention ‘liberalism’ and ‘conservatism,’ ‘political correctness’ tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness.

It’s great that Time is moving in the direction of validating those who, by choice or circumstance, will never be parents. But the point is not simply that society should stop judging those of us who don’t have children. It’s that society actually needs us. Children need us.

Other dogs may do their jobs in their own unique and perfectly wonderful ways, but there will always be that dog that no dog will replace, the dog that will make you cry even when it’s been gone for more years than it could ever have lived.

We don’t want privacy so much as privacy settings.

I respond to about a quarter of comments. It’s a good barometer of my mental health – when I’m healthy and busy, I don’t read them.

Much of the magic of language, of course, lies in its fluidity.

The reason it was so bruising when someone said I was from a rich family is that, like many of us, I’m deeply invested – probably overly so – in the myth of my own self-creation. I like to believe that I got where I am, such as it is, by working hard and charting my own course.

There’s a particular kind of single woman whose relationship with her dog has a level of intensity and affection that may be both the cause and the result of her singleness. For a long time, I was that woman.

Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings – and when it does, especially without warning, there’s rarely anything good on the other end.

This whole notion that it’s somehow easy and simpler to live in the country is such a fallacy.

In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience.

I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side.

Not everyone in Santa Monica is a well-heeled, juice-cleansing, Prius-driving yogini, but for better or worse, that is the city’s dominant chord.

The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It’s not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it’s to challenge people, and it’s to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.

Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone’s either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays.

I think whatever generation you’re in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren’t in.

The search for happiness has long been a dominant feature of American life. It’s a byproduct of prosperity, not to mention the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence.

I was just 13 when ‘The Big Chill’ was released in late September 1983, so I didn’t catch all of its nuances when I sneaked into the theater to see it. But I could tell one thing for sure: These people were grown-ups.

Checking email every 45 seconds is not only compulsive, it’s presumptuous. It suggests a belief that anyone who sends us a message needs us to read it immediately, even if the message is from SkyMall telling us our Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue has shipped.

To be honored by success is to take your life seriously. To humble-talk about it is to take yourself seriously.

People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it’s not something that they’re up for, and I don’t know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that.

Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement.

Air travelers, of course, are famous for their hubris. They carry on too many bags and use the restroom when the seat-belt sign is on.

Just as I never liked bumper stickers – even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student – I don’t like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification.

The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it’s been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I’m referred to as a ‘confessional’ writer.

I always lamented that I wasn’t a writer during the late ’60s and the early ’70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.