Meghan Elizabeth Daum
Meghan Daum is an American author, essayist, podcaster, and journalist. (Meghan Daum Quotes)
“A lot of people who had terrible childhoods have kids to prove that they can do a better job, or to fix some cosmic rift by being the parents they needed to their own children.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“Also, I was coming up on my five year anniversary of owning the house, and if there’s anything I’ve learned in five years, it’s this: if a piece of your house falls off and you don’t know what to do with it, throwing it in the trash and forgetting about it is a perfectly viable option.”
Meghan Daum
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
“And just because I was a little more willing and a lot more able to be a parent didn’t mean I was itching to become one.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“Anthropologie is not butch, phantom or otherwise. It is Disney with a slightly more sophisticated but no less carefully engineered aesthetic. It is to adult women what princesses are to little girls. It is a twirling motion in the form of an international brand.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“As bothered as I am by having to defend my decision, I’m more incensed that people think they have the right to ask.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“At worst, we’re considered selfish or immature; women who don’t want to have children are regarded as unnatural, traitors to their sex, if not the species.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“But a dog confers status on a man. It shows he is responsible and capable of love. It will probably even help him get laid.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“But it’s the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.”
Meghan Daum
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
“Cooking fills me with a dread I can only describe as the sum total of every negative feeling I’ve ever had about myself. It takes my chronic impatience, divides it by my inherent laziness, and multiplies it to the power of my deepest self-loathing.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“Evan Handler is not only a fine actor, he’s a damn good writer. It’s Only Temporary is wise and funny and as righteously indignant as it is endearingly self-effacing. In what may be a literary first, the book actually left me wanting more.”
Meghan Daum
My Misspent Youth
“For my mother’s entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“Having decided there was little point in denying my status as a gentrifier, I joined the neighborhood security association, a network of mostly middle- and upper-middle-class homeowners that employed a small stable of private patrol officers to cruise the neighborhood and scare any potential marauders, most of which amounted to kids loitering near the park.”
Meghan Daum
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
“I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I’d die young. Everything else, I’m doing middle-aged.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“I don’t really want to have a baby; I want to want to have a baby.” I longed to feel like everybody else, but I had to face the fact that I did not.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“I negotiate the terms of my life every day and work hard to maintain an emotional status quo that I had to create from scratch.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don’t love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“If the desire to have children is just a way to build some noisy tribe of distraction around oneself, then I’d rather be alone.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“If you called for nuance, you were part of the problem.”
Meghan Daum
The Problem with Everything
“In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally – and sometimes maddeningly – who we are.” (Meghan Daum Quotes)
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“It terrifies me to admit to a firsthand understanding of the way the heart and the ego are entwined. Like diseased trees that have folded in on one another, our need to worship fuses with our need to be worshipped.”
Meghan Daum
My Misspent Youth
“It would be about one of life’s most reliable disappointments, which is that your audience, no matter how small, is always bigger than those who actually understand what you’re saying.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption—and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.”
Meghan Daum
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
“Most people don’t want what they want: people love to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he’d be lost without it.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“My childhood was so inconsistent that I never expected normalcy, and it’s enough for me to be able to have time and space to be good to myself and the people around me. Children are nice, but I decided to save myself instead.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“My goal in life is to be content. By that I don’t mean “fine” or “basically satisfied.” I don’t mean settling. I mean, for last of better terms, feeling like I’m in the right life.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally – and sometimes maddeningly – who we are.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“No matter where they are or who they’re with, dogs are incapable of being anything but themselves. Show me a dog that puts on airs or laughs politely at an unfunny joke and I’ll show you a human in a dog costume, possibly one owned and licensed by the Walt Disney Company.”
“Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“Not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species and fill up this vast and underpopulated island of ours.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There’s always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“Our most important decisions in life are all profoundly irrational ones, made subconsciously for reasons we seldom own up to, which is why the worst ideas (getting married for the third time, having an affair with your wife’s sister, secretly going off birth control as your marriage is collapsing) are the most impossible to talk anyone out of.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“Reading time is precious. Don’t waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“Reproduction as raison d’être has always seemed to me to beg the whole question of existence. If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what’s the purpose of your children’s lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn’t anyone’s life ultimately meaningful in itself?”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“The idea of loving someone no matter what they do is overrated, not to mention largely impossible.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“The place I took off from three years ago is not the place where I’ve landed. And though I’m still not sure what to make of this terrain, I can tell you that the intellectual uncertainty into which it has forced me is a lot more interesting – and a lot more honest – than some of the convictions that carried me along before. If nothing else, this is a story of its time, which means it’s a story for which we don’t yet know the ending. I’ve never been more afraid of writing a book. I’ve never been more certain I had to.”
Meghan Daum
The Problem with Everything
“There is no life without regrets. Every important choice has its benefits and its deficits, whether or not people admit it or even recognize the fact: no mother has the radical, lifelong freedom that is essential for my happiness. I will never know the intimacy with, or have the impact on, a child that a mother has. Losses, including the loss of future possibilities, are inevitable in life; nobody has it all.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“They protect us from disaster by playing out the disaster ahead of time. They’re the reason the plane doesn’t crash and the bomb doesn’t drop. They’re the reason we will almost certainly not die in childbirth.” (Meghan Daum Quotes)
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“To have an old dog is to look into the eyes of the sweetest soul you know and see traces of the early light of the worst day of your life.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“When I pointed out to her that he’d like the wedding to include his sister’s small children, she told me he had to realize he couldn’t always get what he wanted.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“When women acquire critical skills and start weighing their options, they soon wise up to the fact that they’re not getting enough recompense for their labors.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“When you look into your baby’s eyes,” my friend Sarah once said to me, “that will become your Tibet.” I have no doubt that looking into one’s own baby’s eyes is many inexpressibly wonderful things, but one thing it is not is Tibet.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“When you talk of not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you’re trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence.”
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“Wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person “struggling with same-sex attraction.” As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I’d organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one.”
Meghan Daum
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
“You can’t fight tribalism with a tribe. All you can do is read and think and listen. And if you’re lucky, eventually will come that rousing, fleeting moment when you hear someone say the thing that makes you feel less alone.”
Meghan Daum
The Problem with Everything
“Your ability to see is sometimes only as good as your willingness to go unseen.”
Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable
“If there’s anything I’ve learned in twenty-five years, it’s that the more honest you are about what you think, the more you sit in solitude with your own thoughts.”
Meghan Daum
The Problem with Everything
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