Meghan Daum Quotes & Sayings

If you must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn't grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt. — Meghan Daum

The truth is that most of your Facebook friends are too busy counting their own 'likes' to pay attention to you for more than a few seconds anyway. Unless you happen to be a kitten who's in love with a baby goat, in which case you should hire a publicist immediately. — Meghan Daum

This was a time in my life when I was so filled with longing for so many things that were so far out of reach that at least once a day I thought my heart would implode from the sheer force of unrequited desire.

By desire I am not referring to apartments I wanted to occupy or furniture I wanted to buy or even people I was attracted to (well, I'm referring to those things a little) but, rather, a sensation I can only describe as the ache of not being there yet. — Meghan Daum

Of the countless ways to feel old in your 40s, perhaps none is quite as perplexing as seeing a young person trendily decked out in 1980s-style garb and saying to yourself, 'I can't believe that look is back in style. It was bad enough the first time around!' — Meghan Daum

A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell. — Meghan Daum

She didn't really want to have a baby; she wanted to want to have a baby. — Meghan Daum

Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays. — Meghan Daum

As soon as I accepted that I am this kind of writer and I happen to live here, and stopped going to meetings and stopped beating myself up because I wasn't making a ton of money writing for some stupid sitcom, I felt really at home. — Meghan Daum

In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That's not the general cultural expectation of women. — Meghan Daum

The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things. — Meghan Daum

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world. — Meghan Daum

In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out. — Meghan Daum

Self-righteousness, when you think about it, is a contra-indicator of self-esteem. It's what sets in when genuine righteousness eludes us. — Meghan Daum

It's not that I don't get on bandwagons; I just climb aboard only after most of the band has packed up and left for the next gig. — Meghan Daum

It's great that Time is moving in the direction of validating those who, by choice or circumstance, will never be parents. But the point is not simply that society should stop judging those of us who don't have children. It's that society actually needs us. Children need us. — Meghan Daum

Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that 'whoosh' sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot. — Meghan Daum

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal. — Meghan Daum

I work really hard not to have a kitsch tone to any of my work, particularly radio stuff, which sometimes goes in that direction on certain programs. — Meghan Daum

I've always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences. — Meghan Daum

At some point in my early forties I realized that my primary goal in just about any verbal exchange is to lighten the mood. — Meghan Daum

I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects. — Meghan Daum

To be honored by success is to take your life seriously. To humble-talk about it is to take yourself seriously. — Meghan Daum

I don't think anyone's ever accused me of too much self-love. — Meghan Daum

In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience. — Meghan Daum

Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime. — Meghan Daum

New York is such a special place. It's really intense for people because they live here when they're young. On top of the energy of the city there's a visceral experience a lot of people have because it's a time in their lives where they're just absorbing a lot. Things take on a significance that they might not otherwise. — Meghan Daum

It's odd, then, that in my twenties, despite my devotion to urbanity, I often found myself 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. I can't explain this by way of any rational desire; — Meghan Daum

I think whatever generation you're in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren't in. — Meghan Daum

There may well be a few extremists out there somewhere calling for a militant, women-only utopia, but why should this be the definition of 'feminist' when it's already the definition of 'silly'? — Meghan Daum

Though I probably shouldn't admit this, the activities and pursuits in which I've achieved any measure of success are, without exception, activities and pursuits that came easily to me from the beginning. — Meghan Daum

If anything, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy. — Meghan Daum

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do. — Meghan Daum

Even with men doing more parenting than before, the majority of women are still left facing the well-rehearsed motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it's not a dichotomy; its a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one. — Meghan Daum

I was just 13 when 'The Big Chill' was released in late September 1983, so I didn't catch all of its nuances when I sneaked into the theater to see it. But I could tell one thing for sure: These people were grown-ups. — Meghan Daum

What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you've hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It's supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future. — Meghan Daum

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

Air travelers, of course, are famous for their hubris. They carry on too many bags and use the restroom when the seat-belt sign is on. — Meghan Daum

To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be. — Meghan Daum

As I've gotten older, I've felt I have more authority on that subject. I think the conversation needs to be reframed. What I hate - a lot of conversations about choosing not to have children tend to be couched in these superficial terms, or kind of glib, "I'd rather have a Porsche" or "I forgot to have kids." No you didn't. — Meghan Daum

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

Analyzing data from 79 men and women who wore inconspicuous devices that recorded some of their conversations over the course of four days, researchers from Washington University and the University of Arizona found a correlation between feelings of well-being and the amount of time spent talking every day. Moreover, the more substantive your conversations, the happier you're likely to be. In other words, heart-to-hearts trump small talk. (LA Times, "A lof of happy talk", March 11, 2010, A21.) — Meghan Daum

I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side. — Meghan Daum

Other dogs may do their jobs in their own unique and perfectly wonderful ways, but there will always be that dog that no dog will replace, the dog that will make you cry even when it's been gone for more years than it could ever have lived. — Meghan Daum

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

Choose what you actually want to do rather than what you think will impress people on Facebook. Ironically, when you do this, something amazing happens; what you produce stands a better chance of getting recognition. Not just on Facebook, but in the real world. — Meghan Daum

No one ever talked about such bonds before the rise of industrialization, when wage labor first became an option for women. Note that the bonding story got revved up again in the early 1970s, as women were moving into the labor market (screwing up traditional conceptions about the natural female role), — Meghan Daum

For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked. — Meghan Daum

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

In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point. — Meghan Daum

Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade. — Meghan Daum

I don't keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I'll send emails to friends, and that's a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I've never been a journal keeper. — Meghan Daum

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people. — Meghan Daum

Distance is not for the fearful, it's for the bold. It's for those who are willing to spend a lot of time alone in exchange for a little time with the one they love. It's for those who know a good thing when they see it, even if they don't see it nearly enough — Meghan Daum

The idea of loving someone no matter what they do is overrated, not to mention largely impossible. — Meghan Daum

I started my professional career before the blogosphere existed in any sort of meaningful way. I think that my approach as a writer was certainly freer because I wasn't worried, I didn't have commenters on me right from the get-go. I didn't have this instant-reaction culture that young writers have to deal with now. I had different things - I was listed in the phone book and people would look me up and call me and yell at me, but that was about as bad as it got. — Meghan Daum

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

For so long, maybe all my life, I thought only a house could make you whole. I thought I was nothing without an interesting address. I thought I was only as good as my color scheme, my drawer pulls, my floors ... it's the knowledge that a house can be as fragile as life itself. You'd think it would be stronger, since it can stand in one spot for centuries while generations of humans run through tis rooms, grow up, move out, and eventually die. But a house is an inherently limited entity. It can't do everything, or even most things. I t cannot give you a personality. It cannot bring you love. It cannot cure loneliness. It can provide comfort, safety, a sense of pride
that much I know. — Meghan Daum

Almost nothing is more tedious than complaining about the weather. — Meghan Daum

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

Mother's Day, like motherhood itself, is fraught with peril. There are so many ways to get it wrong, so many opportunities to disappoint and be disappointed. — Meghan Daum

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

A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes. — Meghan Daum

Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings - and when it does, especially without warning, there's rarely anything good on the other end. — Meghan Daum

When I talk to students or young writers about the importance of being unafraid to take controversial positions, I'm struck by the degree to which they can't entertain a thought, much less commit one to paper, without imagining the cacophony of snark they'll get in response. — Meghan Daum

In New York the stakes are so high. In urban centers the stakes are so high. You marry the wrong person, you go to the wrong college, you take the wrong job. Any of these things could really get you in trouble down the road. Or in your mind anyway. You're afraid to make any move, it's paralyzing. — Meghan Daum

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

Just as I never liked bumper stickers - even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student - I don't like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification. — Meghan Daum

It's about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption - and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness. — Meghan Daum

I've always been a late bloomer in some ways, and extremely precocious in other ways. When I was twenty I was living in New York and working a job and could barely bother to be a college student and had my own apartment, but I couldn't possibly get married before I was thirty-nine. — Meghan Daum

There's a particular kind of single woman whose relationship with her dog has a level of intensity and affection that may be both the cause and the result of her singleness. For a long time, I was that woman. — Meghan Daum

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words. — Meghan Daum

I have a distinct memory, dating back to 1989 or so, of sitting around with my college dorm mates talking about a new term that was popping up everywhere: 'political correctness.' — Meghan Daum

There's this tradition of women's magazines - which have been my bread and butter as a freelancer - where the paradigm is that the writing is about relationships, body image, lessons, and it's always redemptive. — Meghan Daum

Few targets of ridicule are as easy to hit as owners and handlers of competitive show dogs. — Meghan Daum

I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes. — Meghan Daum

There's more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You'd think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we're going to join. — Meghan Daum

What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that's such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing. — Meghan Daum

Self-esteem, the kind that comes from finding the sweet spot between a healthy fondness for yourself and healthy self-skepticism, tends to get harder to come by the older we get. — Meghan Daum

I can tell you that the comfort zone has many upsides. It may be associated with sloth and cowardice and any number of paralyzing, irrational phobias. It may be a dark abyss where misunderstood people lie around in fading recliners listening to outdated music. But I'm convinced that, when handled responsibly, the comfort zone can be as useful and productive as a well-oiled industrial zone. I am convinced that excellence comes not from overcoming limitations but from embracing them. At least that's what I'd say if I were delivering a TED Talk. I'd never say such a douchy thing in private conversation. — Meghan Daum

For a kid, self-esteem can be as close at hand as a sports victory or a sense of belonging in a peer group. It's a much more complicated and elusive proposition for adults, subject to the responsibilities and vicissitudes of grown-up life. — Meghan Daum

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in. — Meghan Daum

As with 'feminism,' not to mention 'liberalism' and 'conservatism,' 'political correctness' tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness. — Meghan Daum

Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in. — Meghan Daum

Before digital and mobile communications effectively tethered us to an invisible, infinite 'wire,' even those with the most hectic schedules were usually willing to answer the phone if they happened to be home when it rang. — Meghan Daum

Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place. — Meghan Daum

My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions. — Meghan Daum

It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining. — Meghan Daum

I've been a freelancer my entire career, and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things, whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything. — Meghan Daum

People who grew up before the blogosphere, I just think that your brain is wired differently. I feel like in some ways my sensibility is aligned with people twenty years older than me than somebody six years younger. Because there was a sort of cutoff. — Meghan Daum

I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book. — Meghan Daum

I always tell writers that it's good to have an area of expertise. It's a really practical answer, I know, but know about science or about sports or about medicine, so you can work as a science writer or a sports writer. Don't just know about yourself. — Meghan Daum

I loved 'About Schmidt'. I like Alexander Payne's work a lot. — Meghan Daum

People have always taken photos of themselves, either with camera timers or by handing their Nikons over to strangers in foreign countries and then paying large sums to get them back. — Meghan Daum

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

People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it's not something that they're up for, and I don't know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that. — Meghan Daum

Becoming a parent is always going to be a default setting. I truly believe there will always be more people who want to have children than who don't. — Meghan Daum

If you do the things you enjoy and are good at, I really have a feeling that that will lead to having a fulfilling life, and people with fulfilling lives are able to be 'good people.' — Meghan Daum

Checking email every 45 seconds is not only compulsive, it's presumptuous. It suggests a belief that anyone who sends us a message needs us to read it immediately, even if the message is from SkyMall telling us our Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue has shipped. — Meghan Daum

Social media, despite its reputation as the ultimate agent of self-promotion, actually feeds on self-loathing. — Meghan Daum

it often takes a long time for women to "get into" taking care of themselves, and that her need for autonomy was as much about basking in her hard-won self-actualization as it was a reaction to the exhaustion that comes with tending to a child's every need. These days, as I enter my forties, I find that I am only now beginning to feel comfortable in my own skin, to find the wherewithal to respect my own needs as much as others', to know what my emotional and physical limits are, and to confidently, yet kindly, tell others no. (No, I cannot perform that job; no, I cannot meet you for coffee; no, I cannot be in a relationship in which I feel starved for emotional and physical connection.) — Meghan Daum