Nancy Mairs Quotes

• 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.

  Nancy Mairs

  Prayer, Believe, Listening

  Nancy Mairs (1993). “Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal”, Beacon Press (MA)

  46 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nancy Mairs

  Talking, Disease, Embodiment

  Nancy Mairs (1991). “Carnal Acts: Essays”, Perennial

  16 Copy quote

• I felt permanently exiled from 'normality.' Whether imposed by self or society, this outsider status - and not the disability itself - constitutes the most daunting barrier for most people with physical impairments, because it, even more than flights of steps or elevators without braille, prevents them from participating fully in the ordinary world, where most of life's satisfactions dwell.

  Nancy Mairs

  Self, Ordinary World, People

  11 Copy quote

• people who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn't half so dismal as they assume.

  Nancy Mairs

  Fate, People, Half

  Nancy Mairs (2001). “Waist-High In The World: A Life Among the Nondisabled”, p.102, Beacon Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nancy Mairs

  People, Looks, Poverty

  Nancy Mairs (1993). “Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal”, Beacon Press (MA)

  13 Copy quote

• I will write myself into well-being.

  Nancy Mairs

  Writing, Diaries, Well Being

  11 Copy quote

• no one expects all impediments to be miraculously whisked away. In insisting that others view our lives as ample and precious, we are not demanding that they be made perfect. ... If it is both possible and pleasant for me and my kind to enter, the world will become a livelier place. You'll see.

  Nancy Mairs

  Views, Perfect, World

  Nancy Mairs (2001). “Waist-High In The World: A Life Among the Nondisabled”, p.106, Beacon Press

  7 Copy quote

• God is no White Knight who charges into the world to pluck us like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases. God chooses to become present to and through us. It is up to us to rescue one another.

  Nancy Mairs

  God, Knights, Dragons

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nancy Mairs

  Writing, Erotic, Want

  15 Copy quote

• In a society that prates about, but seldom practices, communication, the craving to be listened to, heard, understood - which originates with the first terrified wail, the circling arms, the breast, the consolatory murmur - is hard to assuage.

  Nancy Mairs

  Communication, Practice, Listening

  Nancy Mairs (2001). “Waist-High In The World: A Life Among the Nondisabled”, p.7, Beacon Press

  7 Copy quote

• If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

  Nancy Mairs

  Dream, Book, School

  Nancy Mairs (1994). “Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (woman) Writer”, Beacon Press (MA)

  13 Copy quote

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

  Nancy Mairs

  Letting Go, Angel, World

  10 Copy quote

• Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

  Nancy Mairs

  Writing, Practice, Riding

  Nancy Mairs (1994). “Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (woman) Writer”, Beacon Press (MA)

  5 Copy quote

• One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.

  Nancy Mairs

  Children, Blessing, Territory

  Nancy Mairs (2001). “Waist-High In The World: A Life Among the Nondisabled”, p.196, Beacon Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nancy Mairs

  Long, Minorities, Warning

  Nancy Mairs (1991). “Carnal Acts: Essays”, Perennial

  9 Copy quote

• To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially, but simultaneously.

  Nancy Mairs

  Pain, Blessed, Views

  Nancy Mairs (1991). “Carnal Acts: Essays”, Perennial

  5 Copy quote

• our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

  Nancy Mairs

  Life, Stories, Our Lives

  4 Copy quote

• A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.

  Nancy Mairs

  Lines

  4 Copy quote

• Through its prohibition on birth control, the Church has suggested that the only right way to have children is through biological reproduction: a kind of forced labor culminating in the production of another soul for God. What kind of a God stands like Lee Iacocca at the end of an assembly line, driving his workers with a greedy 'More! More!' while the automobiles pile up in showrooms and on freeways and in used-car lots and finally junkyards, his only satisfaction the gross production figures at the end of every quarter?

  Nancy Mairs

  Children, Car, Soul

  7 Copy quote

• From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

  Nancy Mairs

  Class, Two, Different

  9 Copy quote

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

  Nancy Mairs

  Two, Fiction, Atlas

  Nancy Mairs (1994). “Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (woman) Writer”, Beacon Press (MA)

  7 Copy quote

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

  Nancy Mairs

  Female, Grammar

  4 Copy quote

• This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period.

  Nancy Mairs

  God, Crazy, Splits

  Nancy Mairs (1993). “Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal”, Beacon Press (MA)

  4 Copy quote

• The charity that begins at home cannot rest there but draws one inexorably over the threshold and off the porch and down the street and so out and out and out and out into the world which becomes the home wherein charity begins until it becomes possible, in theory at least, to love the whole of creation with the same patience, affection, and amusement one first practiced, in between the pouts and tantrums, with parents, siblings, spouse, and children.

  Nancy Mairs

  Children, Sibling, Home

  4 Copy quote

• You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it.

  Nancy Mairs

  Death, Order, Want

  4 Copy quote

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