Top 35 Meghan Daum Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.”

— Meghan Daum

2. “People who grew up before the blogosphere, I just think that your brain is wired differently. I feel like in some ways my sensibility is aligned with people twenty years older than me than somebody six years younger. Because there was a sort of cutoff.”

— Meghan Daum

3. “Anthropologie is not butch, phantom or otherwise. It is Disney with a slightly more sophisticated but no less carefully engineered aesthetic. It is to adult women what princesses are to little girls. It is a twirling motion in the form of an international brand.”

— Meghan Daum

4. “It terrifies me to admit to a firsthand understanding of the way the heart and the ego are entwined. Like diseased trees that have folded in on one another, our need to worship fuses with our need to be worshipped.”

— Meghan Daum

5. “My goal in life is to be content. By that I don’t mean “fine” or “basically satisfied.” I don’t mean settling. I mean, for last of better terms, feeling like I’m in the right life.”

— Meghan Daum

6. “To have an old dog is to look into the eyes of the sweetest soul you know and see traces of the early light of the worst day of your life.”

— Meghan Daum

7. “It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally – and sometimes maddeningly – who we are.”

— Meghan Daum

8. “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.”

— Meghan Daum

9. “I’ve always been a late bloomer in some ways, and extremely precocious in other ways. When I was twenty I was living in New York and working a job and could barely bother to be a college student and had my own apartment, but I couldn’t possibly get married before I was thirty-nine.”

— Meghan Daum

10. “For my mother’s entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.”

— Meghan Daum

11. “In New York the stakes are so high. In urban centers the stakes are so high. You marry the wrong person, you go to the wrong college, you take the wrong job. Any of these things could really get you in trouble down the road. Or in your mind anyway. You’re afraid to make any move, it’s paralyzing.”

— Meghan Daum

12. “There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you’re only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And that is a complete misuse of the writer’s power and unfair to the reader.”

— Meghan Daum

13. “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.”

— Meghan Daum

14. “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.”

— Meghan Daum

15. “I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I’d die young. Everything else, I’m doing middle-aged.”

— Meghan Daum

16. “It would be about one of life’s most reliable disappointments, which is that your audience, no matter how small, is always bigger than those who actually understand what you’re saying.”

— Meghan Daum

17. “You can’t fight tribalism with a tribe. All you can do is read and think and listen. And if you’re lucky, eventually will come that rousing, fleeting moment when you hear someone say the thing that makes you feel less alone.”

— Meghan Daum

18. “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.”

— Meghan Daum

19. “What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that’s such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing.”

— Meghan Daum

20. “As soon as I accepted that I am this kind of writer and I happen to live here, and stopped going to meetings and stopped beating myself up because I wasn’t making a ton of money writing for some stupid sitcom, I felt really at home.”

— Meghan Daum

21. “It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption – and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.”

— Meghan Daum

22. “But it’s the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.”

— Meghan Daum

23. “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.”

— Meghan Daum

24. “I just am a person who loves houses. In a way, it’s dovetailed into one of the themes of The Unspeakable: Why do you have to change? Why don’t you just accept that this is how you are? Why do you have to grow from an experience?”

— Meghan Daum

25. “The idea of loving someone no matter what they do is overrated, not to mention largely impossible.”

— Meghan Daum

26. “Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally – and sometimes maddeningly – who we are.”

— Meghan Daum

27. “Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There’s always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds.”

— Meghan Daum

28. “In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.”

— Meghan Daum

29. “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.”

— Meghan Daum

30. “Also, I was coming up on my five year anniversary of owning the house, and if there’s anything I’ve learned in five years, it’s this: if a piece of your house falls off and you don’t know what to do with it, throwing it in the trash and forgetting about it is a perfectly viable option.”

— Meghan Daum

31. “Evan Handler is not only a fine actor, he’s a damn good writer. It’s Only Temporary is wise and funny and as righteously indignant as it is endearingly self-effacing. In what may be a literary first, the book actually left me wanting more.”

— Meghan Daum

32. “Even with men doing more parenting than before, the majority of women are still left facing the well-rehearsed motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it’s not a dichotomy; its a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one.”

— Meghan Daum

33. “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...”

— Meghan Daum

34. “I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids – let no one say that I don’t love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.”

— Meghan Daum

35. “My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally – and sometimes maddeningly – who we are.”

— Meghan Daum

36. “My childhood was so inconsistent that I never expected normalcy, and it’s enough for me to be able to have time and space to be good to myself and the people around me. Children are nice, but I decided to save myself instead.”

— Meghan Daum

37. “But to me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate. It exists outside of my control. It is simply who I am and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may not signify. But the decision to honor that desire, to find a way to be whole on my own terms even if it means facing the judgment, scorn, and even pity of mainstream society, is a victory. It’s a victory I celebrate every day.”

— Meghan Daum

38. “If you called for nuance, you were part of the problem.”

— Meghan Daum