Mean Baby Quotes

“Someone once told me that grief is love you can no longer express.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“The truth is, I am a person who is meant to stay home and read books, maybe have a nice dinner, and then put myself to bed. That is the life I’m built for. It’s all about the setting. When I’m out in public, it’s as if my system gets overwhelmed and instantaneously short-circuits. I turned the phoenix into ashes, by accident, in small ways, all the time.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“Every person on this earth needs just one person who sees them and roots for them. Deeply, truly. One person. It's what we all need to get through. The more the merrier but let's start with one.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“There is always one person who gets under our skin, who knows our weak spots and neuroses and can’t help but go in for the kill. They are the people who wound us the most, because we care so much about what they think. For my mother, that person was PopPop. For me, that person is my mother.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“Didion again: “There’s a point where you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“Every person on this earth needs just one person who sees them and roots for them. Deeply, truly. One person. It's what we all need to get through. The more the merrier but let's start with one..”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“I used to go looking for answers. I used to crave a warning, a map, a how-to manual, the secret code to hold myself together. I sought protection, largely from myself. I wanted permission to allow someone else to love me. But this is new territory. In a way, MS has cured me. I’ve gotten enough advice from doctors to last me a lifetime. If a crystal ball fell in my lap, I would still gaze into it. I would listen to what it had to say. But now I take everything people tell me with a grain of salt. I no longer feel as if there were anyone who knows more than I do.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“Books also taught me how to notice things, how a moment can be a whole story.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“That’s life. It’ll blindside you, that thing you didn’t know about. Especially when it’s been there all along.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“As I gaze through the lens at a life’s worth of moments, a plate of Barilla spaghetti and a reprimand from my beloved sister are seemingly unimportant, but it filled in my heart from such a young age. This was one of my first introductions to shame. The same shame would keep coming as years went on. There was a whole system, I saw, that wasn’t about being good or even just being. It was about authority, with rules we are not born knowing. If this was how the world worked, I was in for a rough ride. We don’t know what stains a pure heart. We may not remember all those times, when we follow the wrong woman in the grocery store and reach for her hand and feel the red-hot shame for this understandable error. By the time we reach adulthood, we are so accustomed to being here that we forget how big everything used to be. The trespasses that to us seem light once felt like life and death.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“That's the funny thing about limitations; sometimes they aren't about you at all.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“Looking back is the way to move forward. To meet it. There are many plot points I don't remember clearly, so many time frames upon frames lost. I numbed my body and left it an empty shell for taking. I still don't know a lot of the details, and it's safe to say I never want to.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“Looking back is the way to move forward. To meet it. There are many plot points I don't remember clearly, so many time frames upon frames lost. I numbed my body and left an empty shell for the taking. I still don't know a lot of the details, and it's safe to I never want to.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“I learned how it feels when someone else’s thoughts touch a part of you that you haven’t felt before.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“Karl”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“Are you lost, little girl?” I stared her down with my mean baby face, and when she didn’t go away, I shouted, “Shut up!” When she asked again if I needed help, I screamed, “Get out of here!”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“That moment was the end of my childhood.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“To outlive your child is the worst grief, my mother said later that night.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“While our home life was humble compared with that of my wealthier friends, vacations were utopian. Where our house was marked by grim darkness and a shag pea green family room carpet, for me, vacations meant sunshine and pools, fresh pineapple, platters of breakfast room service, and chance encounters with other kids. As children, we had such beautiful vacations that it became my life’s pleasure to try to re-create them. To this day, a good hotel is still what I think of as the highest luxury.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

“My mother admired Waspy women well turned out, so I did, too. She especially adored Grace Kelly. In my mind, I built the impression that they were friends, and that vague story led me to admire all things flaxen-haired and athletic, especially if it came along with big white teeth and some generational wealth. That was the thing back then, and it always came with that rarefied air of belonging—something I never felt.”
― Selma Blair, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up