Quotes from Laurie Notaro

Expert Tip: "Your ankles are swollen from carrying the weight of the patriarchy all of these years."—Danika Hill, MAW

I don't think my Dad was ready for me to come back home, either. I think it had been a long time since he was forced to make conversation at the kitchen table over coffee, especially with the person who had been canceling out his vote in every single election since the mid-eighties.

There are two things people in their twenties do better than anyone else: get drunk and fall down and experience unplanned pregnancies. That, Greta, is your specialty. That is your area of expertise, dear girl, not calling other women out for failing to be tablecloth woke.

I've had to write a column an hour after I've come back from a funeral. A deadline is a deadline, I mean, that was just what my job was.

You're fighting a battle of good and evil with your dog pimp! Your only weapon is the shimmy! There is power in the shimmy! Make him fear your shimmy! Now, goddamnit, show me your war shimmy!

I've never really considered doing stand up, but I have done readings/spoken word things fairly often in which I'll just tell a bunch of stories and run off at the mouth. I'm a big tangent person.

I majored in journalism at Arizona State University, where I began writing the columns I write now, but I cannot, in good conscience, refer to myself as a writer. I'm a columnist, maybe a journalist, I guess I'm an author, but writer... no. That's not up to me to call myself, that's rather lofty. It's for the reader to decide.

Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.

I want a man as nice as my retarded dog, but one that doesn't crap on the floor.

I need to learn to recognize and identify these danger signs when I see them, and not brush them off as "eccentricities," "lovable oddities," or "a sign that he s crying out for help and the comforting of a codependent nurturer that only I, Princess Enabler, can provide. Bad boyfriends don't disguise themselves; their girlfriends do it for them.

Hadn't one of my all-time favorite reveries been to become a cranky hermit, live unperturbed in my house, and have things brought to me like a monarch or tribal lord?

Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent.

Everyone knows there's only one thing less welcome on a stage than a mime, and that's a clown, because everyone knows that clowns eat people.

Whaddaya mean 'old maids,' ha? The term is 'unclaimed treasure,' buddy, 'unclaimed treasure!

There is a (slight) chance that I might be going to hell.

Oh boy. Too drunk to hold on to a whiskey and Coke and the word "pretty." That's not a combination with a positive outcome. Not good at all. That's the secret password that usually leaves me trying to find a ride home in the morning.

I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want?

There are things running around out there with uteruses,son. You're going to need this.

I just might kill someone in my next job, and I'll be honest here, I couldn't do the time. Really. No way. I couldn't share a room with four other people, let alone poop in front of them. I hate sharing a room and a bathroom with my husband, and I even have eminent domain over him. Prison would never work out: I'd get picked last for all of the gangs, I'd never get included in the escape plans, it would be just like high school

So I graduated from college with a degree in journalism and was ready to find my dream job at a newspaper in addition to one good man who owned his own car and was certain about his sexuality, my two new, revised qualifying criteria for a potential date.

I have more faith in my bra than I have in my accountant.

knock, knock. who's there? it's cancer. cancer who? cancer of the section right behind your belly button that you have been trying to pass off as the pinch of ovulation. but it's not. it's cancer. it's me.

If Nana thinks you're trying to scam her, she'll tell you, and if she thinks you ruined her life by discontinuing Arnold's Thin bread, she'll let you know that, too. I guess when you spend eighty-seven years swallowing other people's bullshit, there comes a time when you gotta spit some back.

I'm not big on meeting new people, especially new people I'm never going to see again. There's all kinds of uninteresting, insincere banter, I have to pretend to be a nice person, and because 96 percent of the world's population are dim bulbs, odds are excellent that I'll be stuck in the middle of a Spontaneous Freak Encounter.