Quotes from Koren Zailckas

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 to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?

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 any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.

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 don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.

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 want to yell until my face is red, knock over glasses with the back of my hand, and kick people I don't know in the shins.

By the same token, I think it's time that we allow ourselves to experience real anger as women. And I don't mean that passive aggressive dance that we've employed for too many years. It's not real anger if it is implied or a few degrees removed, if it takes the form of whispering, or cold shoulders, or silent treatment. Real anger is what popular culture would have us be afraid of, based on the fact that it is not courteous, elegant, or feminine.

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 privilege of living.

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 the sound of its firing. Now, even when I yell, I don't feel like I am using my full voice.

Sociopaths have no conscience. Narcissists have no empathy. Neither one thinks other people are real. Narcissists think other people are just ego food, tools or extensions of themselves.

One night, Tess finds me sobbing during the health segment of the evening news. Scientists have discovered scarred cells from cardiac arrest fall away over time, and she can't understand how sadly hopeful that is. To me, it means that the human heart has the capacity to heal itself.

For the next four years, they will again and again tout themselves as "real" and I will be too naïve to know that anyone who uses that designation is disguising a representation of immense falsity

It's not rocking the boat, Dad. It's called communication. You're allowed to ask questions. Other people do it all the time. Other people don't live in fear of someone else's reactions. They don't relentlessly stress out about getting into trouble.

So apparently all homeschooled kids spoke like pretentious liberal arts college students.

Crushes weren't a precursor to love, they were a precursor to having your heart chewed up like Shark Week.

It doesn't occur to me that alcohol might be unhinging me, that drinking at the rate I am can induce depression, impulsive behaviour, and symptoms of bipolar and borderline personality disorder.

It's meant I will act like less of an asshole, but feel much more like one.

It's how fucked-up families communicate. Instead of talking to each other directly, everything goes through a third party. If one person controls all the information, they can lie or pit people against each other.

i feel like the squirrels that so often run in front of our car & then stand paralyzed in the forward crunch of the tires i'm torn between the compulsion to run & the urge to stand still & hope the danger will pass

Sometimes the very loved ones who seem to be causing all our problems are just calling attention to deeper issues the rest of the family would rather ignore.

And narcissists don't love themselves. They hardly have any selves to begin with. They put all their energy into the fake image that they wear like a mask. Only there's nothing but dead space behind it.

Why is it so hard to say good-bye to something even when you know it's a slow-growing cancer?

Religion seemed as good an escape route as any, plus it was conveniently compatible with psychedelics.

Having a baby doesn't make you a mother any more than buying a piano makes you fucking Beethoven

America, ever the narcissistic mother, prefers baby bumps to children and expectant mothers to full-fledged bum-and-nose-wiping ones.

I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.