Maria Lassnig Quotes

When you're in your 20s, you're a little more carefree; you're single. You have a very different way of looking at the world and experiencing the world. But later in your 30s, when you have children, a career, career obstacles, mortgages, car payments and relationships, you have to negotiate; that's a very different life.

I couldn't see much point in tying myself down to a middle-aged woman with four children, even though the woman was my wife and the children were my own.

Mummy always wanted the five children, and she knew she couldn't look after them all because she was this absolutely glorious woman who loved going to parties and going to the races, and she just didn't have time.

When I first ran for Congress, I went to my daughter Alexandra, who was going to be a senior in high school, and said: 'I have a chance to run. I may not win, but I'd be gone three nights a week. So, if you want me to stay, I'll be happy to.' And do you know what she said to me? 'Mother, get a life!'

Life isn't all me. I have a family to support. I can't rob them of a good life simply because I want to play something.

I've never tried to find my real parents. I'm very grateful to my mum and dad for adopting me - they're completely incredible people. It was my dad who encouraged me to question everything, to forge my own path, to think, to read. I always felt it was my right to question everything.

The expectation was I would get married and become a mother and settle down. We didn't have any role models. We saw teachers and doctors and nurses, but I'm not a teacher, and there was no possibility of being a doctor or a nurse. I had to work and find my own way.

I've gotten to learn what's important in life and what's not important, and what to spend energy on and what not to. I don't have a family like some of my teammates, but I have a lot of things pulling at me that I have to put my energy into.

If you're dude, and you're still living at the crib, at home, and you're not taking care of your kid, that's the worst thing ever.

I don't want my own life to be solely about preserving my parents' lives.

A lot of guys have to worry about what their wives and kids think, I don't.

Fathers need to be made aware of their responsibilities - and that's up to all of us to communicate, as parents, as politicians and as members of a community.

A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.

It's not my business to raise anybody else's kids. Mom and Dad got to do all that.

Whether when I was a child and fought the British in the Monkey brigade, or when I was a girl and wanted to have children, or when I was a woman and devoted myself to my father, making my husband angry. Each time I stayed involved all the way in my decision, and took the consequences. Even if I was fighting for things that didn't concern India.

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

The European problem is that it assumes that the minute a woman has a child, the mother identity subsumes the professional identity. Now she's the mother, above all, and we must give her all this time.

I'm not saying to be happy you must be married. Nor am I saying that to be happy you need children. I'm saying that if you opt for children - be you man or woman - you have to take care of them.

Life is for my own to live my own way.

My sisters and I were encouraged to choose the direction of our lives.

Don't take my advice. Or anyone's advice. Trust yourself. For good or for bad, happy or unhappy, it's your life, and what you do with it has always been entirely up to you.

when the time came I would do battle with my mother for the right to sit at the center of my own life.

You have to live your life according to what comforts you, not what the rest of your family thinks you ought to be doing.

I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.

This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values.