The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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.” (Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed Quotes)
Meghan Daum
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
