Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

We've never been in a time where mothers - parenthood, but particularly motherhood - is so fetishized.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement.

Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are.

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

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.)

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.

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.

In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.

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.

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

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

I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged.

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.

Also, I was coming up on my five year anniversary of owning the house, and if there's anything I've learned in five years, it's this: if a piece of your house falls off and you don't know what to do with it, throwing it in the trash and forgetting about it is a perfectly viable option.

It would be about one of life's most reliable disappointments, which is that your audience, no matter how small, is always bigger than those who actually understand what you're saying.

It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally - and sometimes maddeningly - who we are.