Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Sandra Tsing Loh - Page 2

Things need shaking up when American women feel endangered even as Yosemite bears lumber around belching, their eyes glazed with surfeit, their pelts covered in Oreo crumbs.

Oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures.

I agree that mommy wars are not good for any mothers: that such wars are time and effort wasted.

Many men today can cook, or at least order takeout, and know where and how to hire domestic help, perhaps with refreshing clarity and less anxiety than ever-conflicted mothers.

My guitarist husband, Mike, and writer me are the old-fashioned kind of bohemians. Not 'fro-haired hipsters gyrating in iPod ads, but the sort who, starting January 1 of every year, literally don't know where their next dime is coming from.

Life at the top may be privileged, but it is not simple.

A deep river of must-have school mania runs through the chattering classes. There is, of course, the parental adrenaline rush at suburban cocktail parties that comes from announcing one's son or daughter as an Ivy Leaguer.

We women make the lion's share of household purchases in this country. We ourselves drive billions of dollars a year in sales.

The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely 'decent' schools, the ones that are simply 'fine.'

Yes, I was one of the slightly vintage women who let out a shriek when we saw it at Costco: 'The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories', a complete boxed set, fifty-six familiar yellow spines, shrink-wrapped.

I find I'm the sort of harried working mother who has difficulty scheduling in a bit of rest amid the Ptolemaically complicated interlocking gears of professional and personal life.

Parental anxieties: A timeline. Pre-1800s: Potato famine, death of entire villages. 1900s: Trying to keep dad's job through depression so entire family does not starve or have to sell off children to agribusiness. 2000: Infringement of Parenthood on sense of Personhood.

Nowadays, it is possible to perform various forms of Low-Impact listening via the telephone. The advent of technological advances such as computer games and online services (like ones that let you check stocks) have enabled Low-Impact listeners to endure family phone calls much longer than in the past. Dangers include mouse clicks, heavy typing, or a sudden loud buzzer that goes off when you have finished Boggle.

When faced with writer's block, lower your standards and keep going.

It's not racism per se but the tyranny of normalcy - no: the tyranny of attractive normalcy. Which leads to loveable white models who are supposed to be playing ordinary, adorably flawed professionals just like you and me with their brilliant minority friends (with vastly less camera time) who are surgeons. But it's not just ethnicity. That narrow vision also extends to, say, things like women leads. Women leads have to be good-hearted and nice, with a Slutty Best Friend. The main character can't be slutty. Because that's not attractively normal etc

Panic is efficient. Panic is effective. Panic is the way I get things done! Panic attacks are my booster rockets!

Los Angeles is the nation's cultural scapegoat.

Recently it was pointed out to me - in a kind of hurtful way, to be honest - that people in Los Angeles are aurally challenged. That is, at social events, we simply do not listen to others. We do not ask them questions about themselves, we do not nod attentively when they speak; really, if we were to examine ourselves, we would realize that we simply have no interest in others at all.

All autobiography is fiction.

living in Los Angeles was like being an extra in a movie that was starring other people entirely.

here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.