Kate Bolick Quotes & Sayings

my mother died unexpectedly, and in the months that followed I'd been gutted to discover that without our conversations, which I'd always assumed would be there for the having, I had absolutely no idea how to make sense of myself. — Kate Bolick

If a woman liked to play with words and set them in patterns and make pictures with them, and was taking care of herself and bothering nobody, and enjoyed her life without a lot of bawling children around, why shouldn't she? — Kate Bolick

Over the years I've noticed that only men use this phrase - "unlucky in love" - in reference exclusively to unmarried women, as if they can't possibly comprehend that contentment or even happiness is possible without the centrality of a man. — Kate Bolick

If you are lucky, home is not only a place that you leave, but also a place where you someday arrive. — Kate Bolick

Today we tell girls to grow up to be or do whatever they want. But the cultural pressure to become a mother remains very strong; rare is she who doesn't at least occasionally succumb to the nagging fear that if she remains childless, she'll live to regret it. — Kate Bolick

She loved so many things - cats, dogs, roses, people - that sometimes I wonder if she chose to be alone to best enjoy them all. — Kate Bolick

The overall number of single women in America starts at a high of 34 percent in 1890, slides down one percent per decade, all the way to the bottom point of the V - 17 percent in 1960 - and then climbs back up and up, 2 percent per decade, to 53 percent in 2013. — Kate Bolick

When you're single, you are often buried in time, your mouth and eyes and ears stuffed with it. You hate it, rail against it, do whatever you can to get rid of it--work too much, drink too much, sleep around, make unsuitable friends, create an imaginary future filched from the lives of dead forgotten female writers... — Kate Bolick

She'd raised me in her image to be the one true friend she'd never had, and now neither of us would ever know the conversations we'd waited for all our lives. — Kate Bolick

Whom to marry, and when will it happen - these two questions define every woman's existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn't practice. She may grow up to love women instead of men, or to decide she simply doesn't believe in marriage. No matter. These dual contingencies govern her until they're answered, even if the answers are nobody and never. — Kate Bolick

I never shall be an old maid, because I have elected to be a Girl Bachelor. — Kate Bolick

When you find yourself at yet another crossroads, sorting out your best next step, it's as useful to know what you don't want as what you do. — Kate Bolick

When the present feels as endless as an impossibly long hallway between airport terminals, white and sterile and numb, we're particularly receptive to signs. — Kate Bolick

The first thing that struck me was how the single women of my acquaintance were exceptionally alert to the people around them, generous in their attention, ready to engage in conversation or share a joke. Having nobody to go home to at night had always seemed a sad and lonesome fate; now I saw that being forced to leave the house for human contact encourages a person to live more fully in the world. In the best instances, the result was an intricate lacework of friendships varying in intensity and closeness that could be, it seemed, just as sustaining as a nuclear family, and possibly more appealing. — Kate Bolick

Isn't that how falling in love so often works? Some stranger appears out of nowhere and becomes a fixed star in your universe. — Kate Bolick

Coupling, I realized, can encourage a fairly static way of being, with each partner exaggerating or repressing certain qualities in relation to the other's. — Kate Bolick

I hadn't learned to decipher the mysterious ways of the undermind, How occasionally it erupts into an avalanche of clarity, a sheet of snow shearing off the roof and thundering to the ground, leaving the shingles exposed, knowledge issuing a messenger to announce its arrival. — Kate Bolick

I suspected (and still do) that I would love being a mother... — Kate Bolick

Those of us who've bypassed the exits for marriage and children tend to motor through our thirties like unlicensed drivers, unauthorized grownups. — Kate Bolick

Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled. — Kate Bolick

In 1896 the newspaperwoman Nellie Bly asked Susan B. Anthony if she'd ever been in love. Her answer: "Bless you, Nellie, I've been in love a thousand times! But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper. — Kate Bolick

I've always considered myself to be similar. I'm no recluse, but, like an introvert, I need a lot of time alone to reflect and recharge, and I am easily drained by being around others, but at the same time, like an extrovert, I'm energized by parties and conversation. — Kate Bolick

...go live happily alone requires a serious amount of intentional thought. It's not as simple as signing the lease on your own apartment and leaving it at that. You must figure out what you need to feel comfortable at home and in the world, no matter your means (indeed, staying within your means), and arrange your life accordingly--a metaphorical architecture. — Kate Bolick

Key to women's ascent was the typewriter. Invented in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the original model was decorated with floral decals and mounted on a treadle table, like a sewing machine; promoters proclaimed it perfect for a woman's "nimble fingers. — Kate Bolick

(In 2006, social psychologist Bella DePaulo, PhD, coined the word singlism to mean "the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single.") — Kate Bolick

Generally, after three dates one of three things took place: 1) he'd express his lack of interest with a silent fade-out that made me go insane with anxiety; 2) I'd express my lack of interest with an overlong and tortured "it's not you, it's me" e-mail; 3) we'd devolve into a sexual entanglement that either was or wasn't physically satisfying but invariably thrived on noncommunication. After a while it seemed that everyone I knew was tangled in several entanglements at a time, as if we were all becoming intertwined, like a giant rat king, our tails a knotted mass, our mouths gasping for air. — Kate Bolick

Few realizations are as demoralizing as knowing that the only thing standing between you and what you want is yourself, — Kate Bolick

The idea of love seemed an invasion," she wrote. "I had thoughts to think, a craft to learn, a self to discover. Solitude was a gift. A world was waiting to welcome me if I was willing to enter it alone. — Kate Bolick

She never talked about wanting to have children. I believe she wanted solitude and cats. — Kate Bolick

At first I thought it was simply that the specter of the crazy bag lady has been branded so simply into the collective female consciousness that we're stuck with her. Now I realized I was wrong. What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she's living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations. — Kate Bolick

How even I, "a dutiful daughter," as Simone de Beauvoir once described her young self, was living a life so different from my mother's; when she was my age she was married, about to become pregnant with me. I was beginning to think that this habit of mind - constantly tracing myself back to my mother, to where she'd begun and left off - wasn't idiosyncratic, but something that many if not most women did, a feature of the female experience. — Kate Bolick

We need much better and many more models. We need movies where women are attractive and interesting and have great lives and may not be married." She cautioned that conjuring possible selves on our own isn't enough - institutional support is also necessary. "Schools, workplaces, laws, norms, the media - they all need to make it clear that there are other ways to be a woman or a member of one minority group or another. — Kate Bolick

Each of us is a museum that opens for business the moment we're born, with memory the sole curator. How could a staff of one possibly stay abreast of all those holdings? — Kate Bolick

our first experiences of pleasurable solitude teach us how to be content by ourselves and shape the conditions in which we seek it. — Kate Bolick

But the knowing was visceral: if I became a mother, I'd lose myself. — Kate Bolick

including Edna Millay, there were five such women: essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman. — Kate Bolick

Didn't she remember that being single is more than just following your whims - that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week? — Kate Bolick

The question I'd long posed to myself - whether to be married or to be single - is a false binary. The space in which I've always wanted to live - indeed, where I have spend my adulthood - isn't between those two poles, but beyond it. The choice between being married versus being single doesn't even belong here in the twenty-first century. — Kate Bolick