Quotes from Meghan Daum

When you talk of not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you're trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence.

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.

In other words, when women acquire critical skills and starting weighing their options they soon wise up to the fact that they're not getting enough recompense for their labors. In trade union terms, you'd call it a production slowdown...

No matter where they are or who they're with, dogs are incapable of being anything but themselves. Show me a dog that puts on airs or laughs politely at an unfunny joke and I'll show you a human in a dog costume, possibly one owned and licensed by the Walt Disney Company.

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.

The path of least resistance has a lot going for it. The comfort zone isn't where you lose yourself. It's where you find yourself.

What's more, a lot of people who harbor an intolerance for complexity see it not as a character flaw but a cognitive virtue. That's because they've fallen into the trap of believing that complicated ideas (complicated now constituting anything that requires reading, watching or listening to in its entirety) are the purview of the elite.

If there's anything I've learned in twenty-five years, it's that the more honest you are about what you think, the more you sit in solitude with your own thoughts.

life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be

For my part, if I'm working while flying, I'm often a bit relieved to be forced to shut down the computer on final descent. But I guess I'm a slacker.

This whole notion that it's somehow easy and simpler to live in the country is such a fallacy.

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.

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.

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.

The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer.

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.

I don't confess in my work because to me, that implies that you're dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you.

We're not handed situations based on our established likes and dislikes; we get what's available.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!'

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.