Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed Quotes

“I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.”
― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“There is no life without regrets. Every important choice has its benefits and its deficits, whether or not people admit it or even recognize the fact: no mother has the radical, lifelong freedom that is essential for my happiness. I will never know the intimacy with, or have the impact on, a child that a mother has. Losses, including the loss of future possibilities, are inevitable in life; nobody has it all.”
― Jeanne Safer, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“And I have to admit to myself that although I have plenty of sound reasons for not being a father—I know I would also be inconsistent and moody, alternately smothering and neglectful, plus I will never, ever be able to afford riding lessons or braces, let alone college—one of the reasons I don’t want children is fear. I’m afraid that if I ever did have children of my own I would love them so painfully it would rip my soul in half, that I would never again have a waking moment free from the terror that something bad might ever happen to them.”
― Tim Kreider, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Reproduction as raison d’être has always seemed to me to beg the whole question of existence. If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what’s the purpose of your children’s lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn’t anyone’s life ultimately meaningful in itself?”
― Tim Kreider, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“it was only when children’s actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold.”
― Laura Kipnis, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species and fill up this vast and underpopulated island of ours.”
― Geoff Dyer, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn’t make Gabriella and me the “mavericks” we’d both have prided ourselves as in our younger days but standard issue for our era. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy—a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise. In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now—to take that step aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there’s someone around to inherit the place when the party is over—has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction”
― Lionel Shriver, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“People realize that a life that had seemed enjoyable (travel, social life, romance) and fulfilling (work) was actually empty and meaningless. So they urge you to join the child-rearing party: they want you to share the riches, the pleasures, the joys. Or so they claim. I suspect that hey just want to share and spread the misery. (The knowledge that someone is at liberty or has escaped makes the pain of incarceration doubly hard to bear). Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life 'meaning' is the one to which I am most hostile--apart from all the others" (201).”
― Geoff Dyer, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“There are many controversial issues in contemporary American politics where, in spite of my strong feelings, I have the ability to understand and respect the other side. But the notion that we could ever pretend women have real equality in this country when a man as uninformed about basic reproductive gynecology as Mr. Todd Akin could take away my right to decide whether I want to spend a minimum of eighteen years and an average of $235,000 raising a child—not to mention the significant cost to my own dreams and goals or the myriad ways my child might ultimately suffer for my having been denied the ability to make that choice, the ways so many children suffer every day at the hands of their frustrated, stultified mothers—is an absurdity.”
― Meghan Daum, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

“I guess I don't believe you can have it all. I don't believe any of us can. In fact, I believe the very expression having it all is not only a myth but also a symptom of how sick we are in our contemporary culture. Nobody gets to have it all...You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want'" (175).”
― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Our most important decisions in life are all profoundly irrational ones, made subconsciously for reasons we seldom own up to, which is why the worst ideas (getting married for the third time, having an affair with your wife’s sister, secretly going off birth control as your marriage is collapsing) are the most impossible to talk anyone out of.”
― Tim Kreider, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“When you look into your baby’s eyes,” my friend Sarah once said to me, “that will become your Tibet.” I have no doubt that looking into one’s own baby’s eyes is many inexpressibly wonderful things, but one thing it is not is Tibet.”
― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.”
― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“What if I didn’t want to have babies because I loved my job too much to compromise it, or because serious travel makes me feel in relation to the world in an utterly essential way? What if I’ve always liked the looks of my own life much better than those of the ones I saw around me? What if, given the option, I would prefer to accept an assignment to go trekking for a month in the kingdom of Bhutan than spend that same month folding onesies? What if I simply like dogs a whole lot better than babies? What if I have become sure that personal freedom is the thing I hold most dear?”
― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“It also seems honorable that another woman would value motherhood over all my priorities. But I do not believe that I am selfish and she is not. There are women who chose motherhood for selfish reasons. There are mothers who act selfishly even if they chose motherhood in a burst of altruistic love. Selfishness and generosity are not relegated to particular life choices and if generosity is a worthy life goal--and I believe it is--perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity.”
― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption—and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.”
― Meghan Daum, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

“That there could be something in the world that a woman could want more than children has been viewed as unacceptable. Things may be marginally different now, but, even if there is something she wants more than children, that is no reason for a woman to remain childless. Any normal woman, it is understood, wants—and should want—both.”
― Sigrid Nunez, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. (quoting Doris Lessing)”
― Sigrid Nunez, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“The perfect life, the perfect lie … is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don’t want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he’d be lost without it. That’s why children are so convenient: you have children because you’re struggling to get by as an artist—which is actually what being an artist means—or failing to get on with your career. Then you can persuade yourself that your children prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out. So it goes on: things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, a falling short of yourself.”
― Geoff Dyer, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“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, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“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, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“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, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“I don’t really want to have a baby; I want to want to have a baby.” I longed to feel like everybody else, but I had to face the fact that I did not.”
― Jeanne Safer, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“As bothered as I am by having to defend my decision, I’m more incensed that people think they have the right to ask.”
― Danielle Henderson, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“At home, she toed the party line: “The greatest calling for a woman is to be a Catholic wife and mother.” But I sensed that she hated the 1960s convention of stay-at-home motherhood. In my thirties, when my father shipped me my old Barbie-doll cases that had been sealed in storage since my mother’s death, I found evidence of her unhappiness. My Barbie stuff was a mirror of her values. She never told me that marriage could be a trap, but she refused to buy my Barbie doll a wedding dress. She didn’t say, “I loathe housework,” but she refused to buy Barbie pots and pans. What she often said, however, was “Education is power.” And in case I was too thick to grasp this, she bought graduation robes for Barbie, Ken, and Midge.”
― M.G. Lord, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Women are still angry about feeling duped and undervalued, but instead of ignoring their kids and downing cocktails all day, as in Friedan’s time, now we have the angry overdrive child-rearing style: motherhood as a competitive sport.”
― Laura Kipnis, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“So much of being a grown-up is about managing or quelling desires. For food, for drink, for sex, for good times; if you’re a woman, I maintain, for ambition. You should not want too much. It is strange, then, to be in a position where society demands you should have an appetite for something. And yet here was a rare instance where I was appetite-free, and the world seemed to be saying, “You have to want this thing, if only so that we can help you work through your feelings about not having it!”
― Courtney Hodell, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“As a woman who chooses to be childless, I generally have just one problem: other adults. Living in a culture where women are assumed to prioritize motherhood above all else and where a woman's personal choices are often considered matters of public discussion means everyone things they have the right to discuss my body and my choices, so anyone curious about my lack of spawn feels the right to march right on over and ask me about it.”
― Danielle Henderson, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.”
― Lionel Shriver, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Every day, I try to be my own parent - the parent I never had.”
― Danielle Henderson, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids