Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I think whatever generation you're in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren't in. "
Meghan Daum
Nostalgia
Past
Think
Related Quotes:
" Our culture is so obsessed with the idea that you're going to go through a crisis or some difficult event and come out the other side a changed or improved person, and I just think that if you're honest, that often does not happen, and in fact, it shouldn't happen. "
Meghan Daum
You
Crisis
Go
" When there's so much choice, it can get overwhelming and it's hard to make a choice. "
Meghan Daum
Make
Choice
Hard
" For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked. "
Meghan Daum
Writing
Up
Much
" If you must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn't grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt. "
Meghan Daum
Know
Grow Up
Parents
" It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining. "
Meghan Daum
Moving
Me
Challenge
" For a kid, self-esteem can be as close at hand as a sports victory or a sense of belonging in a peer group. It's a much more complicated and elusive proposition for adults, subject to the responsibilities and vicissitudes of grown-up life. "
Meghan Daum
Life
Belonging
Group
" I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do. "
Meghan Daum
Off
Short
Started
" I've always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences. "
Meghan Daum
Culture
Define
Emotions
" If anything, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy. "
Meghan Daum
Fantasy
Anything
Grey
" In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out. "
Meghan Daum
Unseen
Left
Want
" As with 'feminism,' not to mention 'liberalism' and 'conservatism,' 'political correctness' tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness. "
Meghan Daum
Feminism
You
Political
" If something good happens to you, and no one knows it, did it really happen? Moreover, if you don't publicize your accomplishments and good fortune, are you essentially saying you don't care about them? "
Meghan Daum
Happen
You
Saying
" Non-fiction about personal subjects is going to attract more user comments than a foreign correspondent writing from Syria - unfortunately. "
Meghan Daum
Going
Writing
Personal
" I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people. "
Meghan Daum
Early
Always
Journalism
" Let's face it: every campus has its share of students who can't quite comprehend that extreme political correctness is often born of the same intolerance and anti-intellectualism as standard-issue bigotry. "
Meghan Daum
Students
Political
Same
" The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer. "
Meghan Daum
Up
Tradition
Work
" I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side. "
Meghan Daum
Road
View
Tree
" It's great that Time is moving in the direction of validating those who, by choice or circumstance, will never be parents. But the point is not simply that society should stop judging those of us who don't have children. It's that society actually needs us. Children need us. "
Meghan Daum
Great
Children
Time
" We're not handed situations based on our established likes and dislikes; we get what's available. "
Meghan Daum
Likes
Situations
Available
" Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings - and when it does, especially without warning, there's rarely anything good on the other end. "
Meghan Daum
Warning
Without
Girl
" I was just 13 when 'The Big Chill' was released in late September 1983, so I didn't catch all of its nuances when I sneaked into the theater to see it. But I could tell one thing for sure: These people were grown-ups. "
Meghan Daum
September
People
Big
" I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid. "
Meghan Daum
City
Water
New York
" Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade. "
Meghan Daum
Three
Cards
Now
" There's this tradition of women's magazines - which have been my bread and butter as a freelancer - where the paradigm is that the writing is about relationships, body image, lessons, and it's always redemptive. "
Meghan Daum
Body
Bread
Tradition
" I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in. "
Meghan Daum
Genre
Work
Love
" A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes. "
Meghan Daum
Myself
Dog
Day
" The truth is that most of your Facebook friends are too busy counting their own 'likes' to pay attention to you for more than a few seconds anyway. Unless you happen to be a kitten who's in love with a baby goat, in which case you should hire a publicist immediately. "
Meghan Daum
Baby
Truth Is
You
" I work really hard not to have a kitsch tone to any of my work, particularly radio stuff, which sometimes goes in that direction on certain programs. "
Meghan Daum
Sometimes
Direction
Hard
" Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays. "
Meghan Daum
Reading
Writing
Social Media
" In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point. "
Meghan Daum
World
Moving
Moving On