Quotes from Nancy Mairs

God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

I'm only as brave as I have to be . . . and I do not want to have to be this brave.

The capacity to dream beyond the facts of existence into their significance enables us to remember a true past, one that simultaneously reflects and illuminates experience.

Only after many years will I recognize that I, too, have survived a loss, and not necessarily intact. The depression and multiple sclerosis awaiting me will suggest that changes in the structural level have already occurred by the time I learn to forgive Daddy for abandoning me without even saying good-bye.

Thanks to World War II, I am a native Californian, an incongruity that perhaps troubles only a thirteenth generation New Englander. Growing up among relatives whose roots proudly clutch thin and rocky soil, I'm embarrassed to have been born in California, as though I hadn't got properly born at all.