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“As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parentsâ€� closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.”
― Roz Chast

“I gave up on ever trying to get 'my way.' I barely knew it existed.”
― Roz Chast, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

“It's no accident that most ads are pitched to people in their 20s and 30s. Not only are they so much cuter than their elders...but they are less likely to have gone through the transformative process of cleaning out their deceased parents' stuff. Once you go through that, you can never look at *your* stuff in the same way. You start to look at your stuff a little postmortemistically. If you've lived more than two decades as an adult consumer, you probably have quite the accumulation, even if you're not a hoarder...I'm not saying I never buy stuff, because I absolutely do. Maybe I'm less naive about the joys of accumulation.”
― Roz Chast, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

“I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there's any grudges I should start.”
― Roz Chast

“I don't want to be a PULSATING PIECE OF PROTOPLASM!”
― Roz Chast, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

“I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly "done," there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors for the extremely aged. Big art pictures books and music. EXTREME palliative care, for when you've had it with everything else: the x-rays, the MRIs, the boring food, and the pills that don't do anything at all. Would that be so bad?”
― Roz Chast, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

“I feel about Manhattan the way I feel about a book, a TV series, a movie, a play, an artist, a song, a food, a whatever that I love. I want to tell you about it so that maybe you will love it, too. I'm not worried about it being 'ruined' by too many people 'discovering' it. Manhattan's been ruined since 1626 , when Peter Minuit bought it from Native Americans for $24.00.”
― Roz Chast, Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York

“It's really easy to be patient and sympathetic with someone when it's theoretical, or only for a little while. It's a lot harder to deal with someone's craziness when it's constant. . . .”
― Roz Chast

“Manhattan is a narrow island surrounded by various miscellaneous items.”
― Roz Chast, Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York

“But we can't lead our lives in fear of what might be. So live each day to its utmost, only then will you be free. (Poem by Chast's mother)”
― Roz Chast, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

“Never put bananas in the refrigerator.”
― Roz Chast

“Many terrible things begin with B: blindness, boilers, bats, bridges, and brain tumors. But no one brings any of those to a party to up the fun quotient. When I look at a balloon, all I see is an imminent explosion. Where's the fun in that?”
― Roz Chast

“My rabies fear started with "To Kill a Mockingbird", the same way my appendicitis fear started with "Madeline", and my brain tumor fear started with "Death Be Not Proud". On an ideal planet, children's books wouldn't be censored for references to sex, but for illness.”
― Roz Chast, What I Hate: From A to Z

“Some people like meat well done, but they are wrong.”
― Roz Chast , Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?: A Mother's Suggestions

“This is just the way that I draw; it's how I've always drawn. [...] I think of it like handwriting.”
― Roz Chast, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006