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1 " In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience. "
― Nancy Mairs , Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer
2 " Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves. "
― Nancy Mairs
3 " Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions. "
4 " Only after many years will I recognize that I, too, have survived a loss, and not necessarily intact. The depression and multiple sclerosis awaiting me will suggest that changes in the structural level have already occurred by the time I learn to forgive Daddy for abandoning me without even saying good-bye. "
― Nancy Mairs , Remembering The Bone House
5 " I'm only as brave as I have to be . . . and I do not want to have to be this brave. "
― Nancy Mairs , Carnal Acts: Essays
6 " The capacity to dream beyond the facts of existence into their significance enables us to remember a true past, one that simultaneously reflects and illuminates experience. "
7 " Thanks to World War II, I am a native Californian, an incongruity that perhaps troubles only a thirteenth generation New Englander. Growing up among relatives whose roots proudly clutch thin and rocky soil, I'membarrassed to have been born in California, as though I hadn't got properly born at all. "
