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Adair Lara

  • Everybody was bustling about in a very annoying way, plumping pillows, chattering away about centimeters of dilation and how strong the baby's heartbeat sounded. Nobody seemed to have any interest in my heartbeat, and nobody, but nobody, was getting the picture here. I was not having a good time.

  • Everybody I know grows claws and fur behind the wheel. ... it is only here, in your very own castle of rubber and steel, that you can for a short but blissful time throw off the cloak of civilization and be the raging Hun you always wanted to be.

  • Maybe I'm an adult because my friends are. Could that be the way you tell? My friends are tall and drink coffee and have sex. They also eat strawberry ice cream straight from the box and hide notes from their dentists ... and play card games and sulk when their names are left off memos. Maybe no one actually turns into an adult. Maybe you just get to be an older and older kid. Maybe the whole world is being run by old kids.

  • ... good looks build character, as there is so much more temptation to overcome.

  • My new plan is to skip ahead to the talk shows and the movie, and write the novel later.

  • Your family is like your hair after the rain — you can't do a thing with them, so you may as well love them as they are.

  • The sad truth is that there is no point to getting sick when you're a grown-up. You know why? It's because being sick is about you and your mother. ... Without that solicitous hand on your forehead, there is no one to confirm that you are really sick.

  • ... everyone should wear a costume on Halloween, except those for whom it would be redundant.

  • I've figured out why first dates don't work any better than they do. It's because they take place in restaurants. Women are weird and confused and unhappy about food, and men are weird and confused and unhappy about money, yet off they go, the minute they met, to where you use money to buy food.

  • ... cats think about three things: food, sex, and nothing.

  • Being out in the yard makes him yearn to come in, and being inside convinces him his happiness lies in being in the yard. I have to open the patio door for him 400 times a day. When I do, he freezes for a second on the threshold, and it's plain to anybody that even he can't remember whether he's coming or going.

  • A pleasure deferred is a pleasure intensified.

    • Adair Lara,
    • "Something to Look Forward To," San Francisco Chronicle ()
  • We are never so certain of our knowledge as when we're dead wrong.

    • Adair Lara,
    • "A Lot of Knowledge Is Dangerous Too," in San Francisco Chronicle ()
  • Do unto others as others would have you do unto them.

    • Adair Lara,
    • "The Platinum Rule," in San Francisco Chronicle ()
  • When the instructions on the flimsy cat toilet-training device say, 'The cat must weigh no more than 12 pounds,' weigh the cat.

    • Adair Lara,
    • "Some Real People On the Real World," San Francisco Chronicle ()
  • Principles are our way of getting out of things we don't want to do.

    • Adair Lara
  • Having a thirteen-year-old was like having your own personal brick wall.

  • When they placed Morgan, my first child, in my arms, pink and perfect, I thought that only professional ethics (not wanting to make the other new parents feel bad) kept the doctors from commenting on her unearthly beauty.

  • ... everybody started calling me Nana. It felt to me like the verbal equivalent of being sent out on the ice floe when my teeth were too worn down to chew animal hides anymore.

  • ... we'd been calling him Faux Pas, as he is the stepgranddad.

  • You thought a hormone-crazed teenage daughter was touchy? Try a nervous new mother trying desperately to prove that she knows what she's doing. Anything you say (other than 'Here's a check; no need to mention this to your father') will be wrong.

  • Whatever a woman is doing, there's always something else she should be doing.

Adair Lara, U.S. journalist, writer, educator

(1952)