Roz Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes, you know - I think, with a lot of things, at the time, everything is extremely upsetting, and then you look back on it, and it actually can be sort of funny. — Roz Chast

You need to be buried deep in the dirt before you can find your bloom. — Roz Inga

I'm sure that my parents' behavior has entered my work, I'm sorry to say. I don't think you need to have a difficult childhood to be funny, but it helps. — Roz Chast

You could pray all you want that you have a massive stroke while you're working and die, but possibly that won't happen, and you'll be in this bed, and somebody's going to have to clean you up. — Roz Chast

I think of my drawing style like handwriting: it's a mix of whatever handwriting you're born with, plus bits and pieces you've pilfered from other people around you. — Roz Chast

A lot of people feel trapped by circumstance, by the expectations of others or the perception that they need a lot of money. They would like to have a different direction in their lives, but they're held back by fear or desires that are incompatible with that freedom. — Roz Savage

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously. — Roz Chast

I have an African gray parrot; her name is Eli. We thought she was a boy. And a blue-streaked lory named Marco. He's 10. And a yellow and green parakeet, Petey. He's very cute, but he's getting old. — Roz Chast

Sunday, there's not a lot of structure. I might spend an hour thinking about why I don't exercise, and feeling very guilty about not exercising. I tried running, over 10 years ago. It didn't really take. — Roz Chast

I think when your parents die, it is kind of like a moving sidewalk: you're not just on the sideline and watching them go by. You know, you're going to the same place they are. — Roz Chast

I gave up on ever trying to get 'my way.' I barely knew it existed. — Roz Chast

The restorative effect of a tasty dinner is quite remarkable. When the going gets tough, the tough get cooking. — Roz Savage

I sometimes suffer from insomnia. And when I can't fall asleep, I play what I call the alphabet game. — Roz Chast

I don't like anything that looks gelatinous - really weirds me out. But when I was a kid, I used to get very, very upset if anything had a kind of chalky texture; like, certain kinds of cottage cheese I know have a weird chalkiness. — Roz Chast

I have tried hard to be a good person and to leave the world a better place. To feel that I have in any small way succeeded is to me a prize beyond measure, the most wonderful wealth that I could ask for, a form of prosperity that I would wish for the whole world to experience and enjoy. — Roz Savage

Ocean rowing is very much what you make it. Rowing technique is pretty irrelevant on the ocean. It's the psychology that's important. — Roz Savage

I have learned to accept that, in the present moment at least, things are exactly as they are meant to be, and although I cannot control the future any more than I could control the wind and the weather, I can manage it and influence it in a positive way. — Roz Savage

I'm not claiming to be anything out of the ordinary. I am not especially big or strong or brave or intrepid. — Roz Savage

My parents scrimped and saved all their lives, to the point where my mother used a disgusting old oven mitt that was stained and partly patched together with a skirt I made in seventh grade. — Roz Chast

One way of paying tribute to my parents was 'bearing witness' as the Quakers do - writing down everything that was happening instead of turning my back on it and pretending that it was all great. — Roz Chast

I've always wanted to learn how to hook rugs. A wonderful artist named Leslie Giuliani taught me how. The nice thing is you can change it as you go along. — Roz Chast

For me, drawing was an outlet. No one in school said, 'Oh, she can do sports,' or, 'She's pretty,' but I could draw. — Roz Chast

I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they're verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they're happening. — Roz Chast

It's almost selfishness, taking care of your mental health. You can't just not do it. — Roz Chast

I don't put myself through that nauseating experience of looking at someone's face while they go through your stuff. Ugh! It's just horrible! It gives me the cringes to even think about it. — Roz Chast

My parents were born in 1912; they graduated from college into the Depression. They kept notebooks of every nickel they spent, and these habits of frugality from having grown up so poor never left them. — Roz Chast

I love detail, like drawing what's on top of someone's coffee table. Maybe there's a little bowl of butterscotch candies on it, next to the four TV remotes. — Roz Chast

I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly "done," there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors for the extremely aged. Big art pictures books and music. EXTREME palliative care, for when you've had it with everything else: the x-rays, the MRIs, the boring food, and the pills that don't do anything at all. Would that be so bad? — Roz Chast

My kids always joked that I spent more time cooking the birds' food than I have cooking for them. And it's probably true. — Roz Chast

The truth: after just one novel, I had lost touch with my muse. The quietly desperate, jaded girl in my head had stopped slinging sardonic wit into my psyche. — Roz Bailey

You can say no," he rasped, his breath warming her lips. "But you ought to know I've been thinking about this all day."

Crystal savored the heat that slammed through her body as she placed her palms on his chest. Rising on tiptoe, she said softly, "Just do it, Tanner. — Roz Denny Fox

I love my parents. I did love them. It's complicated. — Roz Chast

I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there's any grudges I should start. — Roz Chast

I look forward to being older, when what you look like becomes less and less an issue and what you are is the point.
(As quoted in Put Your Big Girl Panties on and Deal with it, Roz Van Meter, 2007) — Susan Sarandon

My works were not - and they still aren't - single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don't draw them. — Roz Chast

I don't think any of my kids' books talk down to kids. — Roz Chast

I don't like cartoons that take place in Nowhereville. I like cartoons where I know where they're happening. — Roz Chast

The Milky Way swooped diagonally across the heavens, reminding me of my utter insignificance, and at the same time my complete interconnection with everything. I was just a tiny speck of consciousness, and yet I was consciousness itself. — Roz Savage

Nights were the worst. I'd try to get some sleep, only to be thrown out of bed and dragged out into the compound for another game of "Let's whack Bobby in the dark!" - Bobby Pendragon, RoZ — D.J. MacHale

I have learned to be kinder to myself, to imagine that I am my own best friend, whispering comforting words in my ear and drowning out the voices of Self-Doubt and Self-Criticism. I have learned to acknowledge and appreciate the 98% that I have achieved instead of the 2% that I didn't. — Roz Savage

A few years ago I wrote two versions of my obituary, the one I wanted and the one I was heading for. They were very different. I realized I needed to make some big changes if I was going to look back and be proud of my life. I am making those changes, and now I have a life worth living. — Roz Savage

My parents were extremely reluctant. When my father was clearly dying, my mother refused to acknowledge it. — Roz Chast

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain. — Roz Chast

I think that children's books should be censored not for references to sex but for references to diseases. I mean, who didn't think after reading 'Madeline' that they were going to get appendicitis? — Roz Chast

It cracks me up to see these ads for TV - for Depends or for glue for your dentures. The people in them look 55 with a hint of gray. Where are the people who are falling apart? We don't see that. — Roz Chast

The bigger the challenge, the bigger the sense of accomplishment when you get to the end of it. — Roz Savage

Did you know that you can live on Ensure for a year? A person can live for a really long time just lying in bed and drinking Ensure - way longer than you think. — Roz Chast

Being female was just one more way I felt different and weird. I was also a young 'un, and also my cartoons were not like typical 'New Yorker' cartoons. — Roz Chast

A friend of mine gave me a very good piece of advice, which is if you don't think your kids are going to want it, don't take it. — Roz Chast

She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself, make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labor over Roz's life as if it's a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she's in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. — Margaret Atwood

I don't want to be a PULSATING PIECE OF PROTOPLASM! — Roz Chast

My life is so boring that your brains are going to melt and come out of your eyes. — Roz Chast

Like riding a bike for the first time, sometimes you just have to go for it. If you keep looking forwards and maintain your momentum, it will probably go well. But if you start to doubt yourself and look back, you are more likely to suffer a major wobble followed by a crash. — Roz Savage

I just really love the cartoon form. I love the plasticity of it. — Roz Chast

I went through a lot of my life not being mindful of how I was living it. I wasn't mindful environmentally, or whether I was on track. — Roz Savage

I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries ... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes. — Roz Chast

Roz to Amelia (the house ghost): How considerate of you, after trying to kill me, to see that I don't catch a cold. — Nora Roberts

Grime is not like messiness or some fingerprints on a cabinet; it takes a long time to accumulate. — Roz Chast

I don't like going into the basement. I'm always afraid that something's going to blow up. — Roz Chast

I always imagined my little cartoons on plates for some reason. — Roz Chast

I am a rolling stone, never in one place for very long. — Roz Savage

Charis disapproves of crass words like shit. Roz has offered poop, but Charis rejected it as too babyish. Her alimentary canal products? Tony has suggested. No, that sounds too coldly intellectual, said Charis. Her Gifts to the Earth. — Margaret Atwood

It was deeply interesting to observe my mother closely and to draw her. During those last months, she wasn't speaking much, if at all, and it was a way for me to be with her. It felt very natural. — Roz Chast

I don't for a moment think I am any braver or better than anybody else. This is how I attempt to explain what gives me the strength to do what I do; when that thunderbolt of an idea first hit me and inspired me to row across oceans, it filled me with a sense of purpose so strong that it overcame my fears. Even when boredom, frustration, fatigue or despair threatened to overwhelm me, it was that powerful sense of purpose that kept me going. — Roz Savage

I stopped rowing for a moment to glug down some water, but it was warm, tasted of plastic, and failed to refresh. I yearned for an ice-cold drink - preferably one with bubbles and alcohol in it. — Roz Savage

The fact that cartoons are reproduced doesn't mean anything to me as far as whether they are "real art" or not. — Roz Chast

I don't own designer clothes, or a sports car, or a huge house, but I am seeing the world, experiencing amazing things, and I have become an environmental campaigner. — Roz Savage

My parents were very, very close; they pretty much grew up together. They were born in 1912. They were each other's only boyfriend and girlfriend. They were - to use a contemporary term I hate - co-dependent, and they had me very late. So they had their way of doing things, and they reinforced each other. — Roz Chast

I was the child at school in second-hand or handmade clothes and, as I grew older, I craved material wealth, a big house and designer clothes. — Roz Savage

Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn't looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets. What — Margaret Atwood

Just as all writers were beginners once, so were all novels. They all went through rough stages, even the ones by our most hallowed masters. — Roz Morris

I used to love to draw things that made me laugh or made friends laugh. When I was 13 or 14, I started thinking, This is what I like to do more than anything else. — Roz Chast

I think, with my cartoons, the parent-like figures are kind of my own archeypes of parents, and they're taken a little bit from my parents and other people's parents, and parents I have read about, and parents I dreamed about, and parents that I made up. — Roz Chast

If I ever stop challenging myself, then I am getting lazy and comfortable and I am no longer growing. I hope to use life's challenges as stepping stones to ever greater things. — Roz Savage

I noticed that I used to go to second hand shops and flea markets and find funny, cute things, but now I go into those stores, and I think, This is dead people's stuff. This is all, like, somebody cleaned out their parents' house, and I don't want any of it. If I didn't want it from my parents, I don't want it from your parents. — Roz Chast

It's no accident that most ads are pitched to people in their 20s and 30s. Not only are they so much cuter than their elders...but they are less likely to have gone through the transformative process of cleaning out their deceased parents' stuff. Once you go through that, you can never look at *your* stuff in the same way. You start to look at your stuff a little postmortemistically. If you've lived more than two decades as an adult consumer, you probably have quite the accumulation, even if you're not a hoarder...I'm not saying I never buy stuff, because I absolutely do. Maybe I'm less naive about the joys of accumulation. — Roz Chast

To live a fulfilling life is an endurance event, and the only way to get to the finish line is to focus on the present, checking from moment to moment that I am still heading in the right direction. The Atlantic taught me that no matter how huge and seemingly impossible the task, anybody can achieve extraordinary things, by simply taking it one stroke at a time. — Roz Savage

When my father died, my mother was still alive. And I think when your second parent dies, there is that shock: 'Oh man, I'm an orphan.' There's also this relief: It's done; it's finished; it's over. — Roz Chast

I don't like holidays. And I don't like crowds of people. I don't like noise. — Roz Chast

There's something about most phobias where there's a tiny, tiny corner where you think this really actually could happen. — Roz Chast

I had the impression in art school that cartooning was thought of as a lesser art than painting because cartoons are reproduced, so the "work" is not the single thing like a painting, but instead is the reproduced image. — Roz Chast

It felt as if everything that had happened so far in my life had been leading me to this point, preparing me for this task, and that I was uniquely equipped to pursue this quest. It was a perfect collision of personality, past experience, purpose, and timing. — Roz Savage

I think, especially with my parents, I wanted to remember who they were. I wanted to remember all of it. I didn't want to purge myself of it. I wanted to remember it. — Roz Chast

It's amazing how resourceful you can become when you're in the middle of the ocean and there's only one way to get to the other side. — Roz Savage

Childhood - that was not my favorite time in my life. — Roz Chast

In Brooklyn, I don't feel that I'm holding up people with briefcases if I catch a stroller wheel in the sidewalk. — Roz Chast

So let's raise the tone of the debate. Too often at the moment we look like schoolchildren squabbling over a toy - our most precious toy, the Earth. And the danger is that as we pull in opposite directions in our global tug of war, the Earth will end up broken - or at least unable to sustain human life. That is the worst case scenario - or maybe, from the Earth's point of view, the best. — Roz Savage

Codependence means we are depending on something outside of ourselves to provide our sense of wellbeing and are not being true to ourselves and our own feelings. As long as we keep believing that we can make someone else happy or that someone else has the power to make us happy, we are setting ourselves up for frustration, failure, and possibly victimization. — Roz Van Meter

It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. We're all part of the culture. We're reflecting it; we're changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing. — Roz Chast

I used to think of the cartoons as a magazine within a magazine. First you go through and read all the cartoons, and then you go back and read the articles. — Roz Chast

"Stepping outside your comfort zone is supposed to feel uncomfortable because we're in new and unfamiliar territory. Being uncomfortable is a sign of success, NOT of failure! So if we are uncomfortably outside our comfort zones, then than means we are growing!!! And THAT is cause for celebration!" (modified from a passage in Roz Savage's "Rowing the Atlantic") — Roz Savage

Sometimes our emotions get in the way of our ability to make clear decisions and this was one of them. But I don't think you should regret it. Everything happens for a reason. — Loni Flowers

My advice is don't keep asking yourself if you can do something. Just get out there and do it. You can really surprise yourself. — Roz Savage

You might have a worry that's so stupid it just peters out by itself, like a bad investment. — Roz Chast

Even if you don't have any dishes, you need a celery dish. — Roz Chast

My parents were fine at 85. So 85's nothing. 100 is another thing. I have a friend whose mother is about to turn 101, and it's not great. — Roz Chast

I just used to have a really normal life, working in an office. — Roz Savage

I can't even look at daily comic strips. And I hate sitcoms because they don't seem like real people to me: they're props that often say horrible things to each other, which I don't find funny. I have to feel like they're real people. — Roz Chast

I think maybe to survive, I mean to just get through the day - I'm not saying that everything is hilariously funny. — Roz Chast

What then, is dark fantasy? I would argue that it is a genre of fantasy whose protagonists inhabit the world of consensual mundane reality and learn otherwise, not by walking through a portal into some other world, or by being devoured or destroyed irrevocably, but by learning to live with new knowledge and sometimes with new flesh. — Roz Kaveney