Nancy Mairs Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I will write myself into well-being.

God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.

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.

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

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

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

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.

A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.

our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

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

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

You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it.