Nancy Mairs Quotes

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

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.

no one expects all impediments to be miraculously whisked away. In insisting that others view our lives as ample and precious, we are not demanding that they be made perfect. … If it is both possible and pleasant for me and my kind to enter, the world will become a livelier place. You’ll see.

God is no White Knight who charges into the world to pluck us like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases. God chooses to become present to and through us. It is up to us to rescue one another.

people who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn’t half so dismal as they assume.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

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.

This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period.

our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

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

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

In a society that prates about, but seldom practices, communication, the craving to be listened to, heard, understood – which originates with the first terrified wail, the circling arms, the breast, the consolatory murmur – is hard to assuage.