Top 35 Mary Laura Philpott Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It takes courage to quit something, but often you get that courage back with dividends.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

2. “In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote that “when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” Every despair in the world comes down to this, she believes. Every joy, too, I say. Because every joy will run out. And so will every life. And maybe that’s what I mourn as my children grow: the fact that they and I and we will one day not be here at all. No one’s getting out of here alive.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

3. “The picture you get at the end of a connect-the-dots activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try things and go through phases.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

4. “A good quit feels powerful. Deciding what you won’t have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

5. “Sometimes you know one phase of life is ending – you’ve outgrown a relationship or reached the end of a long project – but you don’t know what the next step is supposed to be. You feel sure you can’t go forward and you can’t go back and you absolutely, positively cannot stand still one minute longer, all of which is insanely frustrating.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

6. “Life will surprise you. You’ll hit dead-ends and detours. There will be times when you can’t fathom what comes next. When that happens, remember yourself as you are right now. Remember yourself as you were when you were even younger. Who were you when you weren’t wondering who you were?”

— Mary Laura Philpott

7. “I knew that one of the reasons we talked so much when we were younger was that we needed to figure out who we were and what we believed – we needed to hear it out loud, change it a little, hear it again. I knew time was at a premium and life was more complicated nowadays; there was less time available for talking. But didn’t the very fact that life was more complicated now mean we had more to talk about, not less?”

— Mary Laura Philpott

8. “So there you have it. When I was growing up, my mother was a hard-ass, and she turned me compulsive. It’s all my mother’s fault. Or: When I was growing up, my mother was my cheerleader, and she made me successful. It’s all to my mother’s credit.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

9. “Over time, “I miss you when I blink” became another one of these phrases. It helps me live in the moment. It slows me down and makes me absorb each instant instead of rushing, because I know already how much I miss things that happened in the past-how they’re right there behind my eyelids but also gone forever.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

10. “Maybe we all walk around assuming everyone is interpreting the world the same way we are, and being surprised when they aren’t, and that’s the loneliness and confusion of the human experience in a nutshell.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

11. “Even if you deliberately choose to do a “wrong” thing, you’re choosing it, which means you’ve picked it as the right thing to do.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

12. “My mind seeks the tidiness of a question answered. An agenda complete. A box checked. That’s what harmony feels like in my brain. Wasted time and wrong answers disrupt that harmony like an off-key instrument making a dissonant clang in a musician’s ears.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

13. “She didn’t look at her new routine like a failure to make her old routine work; she looked at it like a sensible solution. No big deal. You can just change things, I thought. What a concept.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

14. “Somewhere deep in my twisted little brain is the desire to be so good at so many things that I earn the chance to be multiple people. It seems so unfair that we only get to read the choose-your-own adventure book of our lives once, that we can’t pick a point and go, “Okay, this time flip to page 102 and do the rest another way.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

15. “None of us will be okay, in the end. The not-okay is coming for everyone... We act like there are safe places. We behave as though if we work hard and acquire the right things, gain the right access, put ourselves in the right zones, we can arrive someplace where danger can’t touch us- where anything can’t happen. We pretend that if we can identify someone else’s loss as greater than our own, we won’t lose. But nothing really guards our lives. Lifeguards don’t exist.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

16. “I needed to know that once school ended, I’d still have goals to reach for – if not grades to earn, then professional accomplishments to rack up. I wanted a ladder with rungs, a hierarchy with titles, some structure to place around my need to achieve. I was afraid to exist without succeeding, I just had to figure out what to succeed at.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

17. “I have felt it so many times in my life, at points where I didn’t really know who I was anymore, where I felt that when I closed my eyes, I could feel myself gone.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

18. “A good quit feels powerful. Deciding what you won’t have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have. Trying out something you expect to love, realizing you don’t really love it, and giving it back, that takes guts.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

19. “Mostly, as my friends seemed to plug along in pursuit of their postgraduation dreams, I stared terrified into the abyss, wondering if I’d be able to see my dream once my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Looking back, I realize pretty much everyone felt as lost as I did. But I didn’t know that then, and I wanted a plan of my own. I would not allow entropy.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

20. “What I wanted, after several years of staying at home, alternating freelance proofreading jobs with trips to the toddler playground, was a little more structure, a little more sense of purpose, and some acknowledgement from somewhere that I was important. I had not ceased to be a member of society just because I no longer applied a swoop of eyeliner each morning before I went out into the world and sat around conference tables where other people could see me.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

21. “For so many people I know, there is no one big midlife smashup; there’s a recurring sense of having met an impasse, a need to turn around and redo the way you are or else you’ll lose your mind.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

22. “Whether you think you know exactly who you’ll become or have absolutely no idea, I tell them, one this is true for everyone, for better or for worse: Life will surprise you. You’ll hit dead-ends and detours. There will be times when you can’t fathom what comes next. When that happens, remember yourself as you are right now. Remember yourself as you were when you were even younger. Who were you when you weren’t wondering who you were?”

— Mary Laura Philpott

23. “We all keep certain phrases handy in our minds – Hanging on hooks just inside the door where we can grab them like a raincoat, for easy access.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

24. “I tried to imagine myself as an action-movie hero, tossing a match over my shoulder and walking off in slow motion as an explosion bloomed behind me. The problem is that if you toss a match like that, you can’t control what it burns, and there was so much in my life I didn’t want to burn down.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

25. “I used to think babyhood was the neediest stage of life, but teenagers need their parents just as much – maybe even more. A baby needs a snuggle, some eye contact, a song. A teenager needs a trusted adult to talk things out with when they or a friend gets into a scary situation.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

26. “Loving a teenager is just as emotionally intoxicating as loving a baby. Maybe even more.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

27. “I did not know in those first days that once you have children, the passage of time feels different than it did before. Everyone says this, and it’s true. Days with young children feel 400 hours long, but years flash by in seconds.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

28. “Sometimes time moves quickly and sometimes it moves slowly, but it always moves forward. This is not your life forever.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

29. “As far as I can tell, the uncertain part is every second we’re alive, until the last.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

30. “I don’t think, This is my life right now. I think, This is my life forever. I panic. I forget, although I’ve learned it countless times, that every stage of life changes, then ends.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

31. “When we begin things, we can’t possibly know how they will end. Everything we plan is built on guesses and hopes, never on certainty. It’s a wonder anybody ever starts anything.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

32. “Sometimes, in moments of memory or daydream, I feel the different iterations of myself pass by each other, as if right-now-me crosses paths with past-me or imaginary-me or even future-me in the hallways of my mind. “I miss you when I blink,” one says. “I’m right here,” says the other, and reaches out of hand.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

33. “I wish I didn’t have a to-do list in my peripheral vision at all times... My brain seeks tasks to check off, i’s to dot and t’s to cross.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

34. “A baby’s arrival gives us adults the closest thing we’ll ever get to magic. There’s no person there, then there’s a person. You witness the opening of the window between whatever other dimension there is, and here. Where did this new soul come from? Who else is over there? It’s mind blowing because that window must have been there all along, but you’re just now noticing it.”

— Mary Laura Philpott

35. “Life can’t be all beginnings, but I am still a little stuck on the fact that I don’t want my people to go. I’m a little stuck on the idea that what I want has anything to do with anything.”

— Mary Laura Philpott