Top 25 Kim Brooks Quotes

I grew up in a time when I could play and bike in the neighborhood, largely because my parents assumed that if I ever needed help, I could ask a nearby adult.

I got an MFA in fiction.

I had never intended to be a stay-at-home-mom.

If you’ve driven your kids to the store, and you leave them for five minutes, by far the most dangerous thing you’ve done is just put your kid in the car and driven them to the store.

I’m sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I’d had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn’t necessarily very good.

In a country that provides no subsidized child care and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for parents, no universal preschool and minimal safety nets for vulnerable families, making it a crime to offer children independence in effect makes it a crime to be poor.

In college, I’d gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn’t fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others’ inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.

I wonder if all love affairs, all marriages, all lifelong partnerships, aren’t in some ways a turning away from the world.

We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.

When I read stories of suffering, I still feel something. It seems inhuman not to. At the same time, I’m more aware than ever of how little my feeling is worth, of how – if we are to truly keep alive the conditions that make ethical life possible – it is not empathy that’s needed but insight, organization, and action.

Lke so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class.

All interesting, worthwhile humans suffered and struggled and overcame adversity of one sort or another. Pain is constructive. Misery can be useful. I believed this the way I believe the sun rises in the east. Then I had children, and I slowly began to disbelieve and disavow it.

A lot of my friends aren’t parents. I find this culture of all-consuming motherhood so oppressive. Not that I don’t like to talk about my kids, but if I’m socializing, I don’t want to talk about Montessori versus Waldorf.

I love my husband. I love my family.

I always knew my mother loved me, but I also knew just as surely that there were moments, hours, days, when she could hardly cope with her own life, much less motherhood. Often, these episodes came without warning, like a change in weather, and so I became a meteorologist of her dysphoria.

Sometimes we do things not because they’re fun but because they’re important.

When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.

The desire to keep television out of our son’s life was one of the few parenting priorities my husband and I agreed on from the beginning. We debated the pros and cons of co-sleeping, of pacifiers, of chemical-free crib mattresses and baby sign language. The television question, on the other hand, was a no-brainer.

I have a profound and unshakable love of good eating.

Having a kid who begged for ‘just a few more minutes’ of television was the antithesis of what I had hoped parenthood would be. It was resigning ourselves to a universe of want and consumption.

Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone.

It shouldn’t be normal to be anxious all the time about your children, so women should seek mental health help if they’re having excessive levels of anxiety.

‘Did our parents really let us do that?’ is a game my friends and I sometimes play. We remember taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds.

A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children.

At times, our collective anger seems a worthwhile thing – it has a weight and shape and force we couldn’t achieve as individuals – but at other times, I can’t help wondering how much it really accomplishes, if in some ways it might even impede us in our attempts to be more thoughtful, ‘enlightened’ human beings.