Quotes from Sandra Tsing Loh

The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely 'decent' schools, the ones that are simply 'fine.'

I'm a journalist, so my friends are journalists: magazines, newspapers, even public radio. Nobody had their kids in public school.

We women make the lion's share of household purchases in this country. We ourselves drive billions of dollars a year in sales.

When you face writer's block, just lower your standards and keep going.

we don't sit enough with our grief and let our bodies process it.

When I realized that by "no one" this man was referring to approximately 750,000 children, I knew that I had found my passion and my cause.

because in point of fact we would have come flying if we had known remotely how much he was suffering.

By changing my thinking patterns, I have somehow become able to excrete a hormone that douses anxiety instead of fuels it.

My ex—who was an academic—and I used to argue about the best way to broil a salmon. Neither of us was grateful for the gift that someone else might cook it, albeit slightly incorrectly. It was a horrible way to live.

The hormonal imbalance is actually fertility. Fertility is the change. That's when a woman loses herself.

I remember when my kitten got run over. My mother was devastated. She put it in a green garbage bag and cried and cried. She said she couldn't stop picturing that little cat. Tumbling and tumbling and tumbling.

Sometimes you just have to go through the crash and see if you can walk away on two legs.

I am a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol.

Although my life is far from perfect, the irony is that in a divorced parent's custody schedule - with days on and days off - instead of like it was before, when I felt ragged and still oddly guilty all the time, now I feel guilty but not ragged.

When husbands and wives not only co-work but try to co-homemake, as post-feminist and well-intentioned as it is, out goes the clear delineation of spheres, out goes the calm of unquestioned authority, and of course, out goes the gratitude.

Oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures.

I eye 'Modern Love' warily between that second and third cup of coffee on Sunday mornings, calculating how much of a push I need to get through the day's unhurriedly earnest saga of heartbreak and recovery.

Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a US citizen was 48, so most menopausal women were dead, which is not a great place to be.

In our youths, many of us suspected that being tied down to a partner and family might constrain us. But after 40, even that landscape starts to shift. Many singletons turn inward and start longing for the things so many of us longed to be free of in our 20s.

In the end, the real wisdom of menopause may be in questioning how fun or even sane this chore wheel called modern life actually is.

In the 'Mad Men' era, the archetypal dad came home; put down his briefcase; received pipe, Manhattan, roast beef, potatoes, key-lime pie; and was - apparently - content.

Many men today can cook, or at least order takeout, and know where and how to hire domestic help, perhaps with refreshing clarity and less anxiety than ever-conflicted mothers.

Whether you wish to chant 'Our houses, our selves' or 'We have houses, hear us roar,' for us women, home is where the heart is.