Koren Zailckas Quotes

24 quotes in 561 categories

• For the first month of school, writing is its own upper. Pounding on my computer keys feels like playing the piano, like arranging words into… Arranging
• I dont know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, its always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As… Always Felt
• I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree. Agree
• I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop… Been
• I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped… Alcohol
• But lately, when I’m drunk, I feel a hostility that I’ve never known before. It is a tension deep in my gut that makes me… Deep
• Me? I'm just a literary girl gone wrong. Slow with the tongue. Quick with the pen. Undeniably cute. But, on the whole, ill-equipped for the… Cute
• Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete, the way Plato says we are each born only half a circle, and we spend out lives… Beloved
• I am aware that somewhere along the line, I've subconsciously turned down the pitch of my speech, like a silencer of a gun that softens… Along
• I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon… Ambitious
• There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I… Circles
• My demeanor isn't that of a woman enraged. To see me slumped, glassy-eyed, holding a sandwich someone has cut for me into four "manageable" pieces,… Cut
• My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract… All
• But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous. Abuse
• My short stature may have something to do with my tendency to shout when enraged. How else is anyone going to hear me way down… Anyone
• In my early to mid-20s, a fear of confrontation made it difficult for me to end relationships in a mature or even quasi-sane way. Instead,… Add
• I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were… Afterward
• If mothers are our first teachers, then having a narcissistic one teaches us that human closeness is terrifying, and the world is a heartless, inconsistent… Closeness
• I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers. All
• America, ever the narcissistic mother, prefers baby bumps to children and expectant mothers to full-fledged bum-and-nose-wiping ones. America

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