Quotes from Susan Jane Gilman

Sure, beauty has the power to excite men. But so does a box of donuts.

A girl doesn't need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot. Certainly I, at least, never have.

Good girls don't hurt other people's feelings. Good girls are not overly aggressive, competitive, or boastful. Good girls please others. But what good girls are good for is another question.

Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow- minded culture.

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen. I wanted to be everything at once: a prima ballerina, an actress, a model, a famous artist, a nurse, an Ice Capades dancer, and Batgirl. I spent inordinate amounts of time waltzing around our living room with a doily on my head, imagining in great detail my promenade down the runway as the new Miss America, during which time I would also happen to receive a Nobel Prize for coloring.

Everybody thinks that once you reach the top, you can lie back on a divan with a goddamn mai tai. No. Wrong. Success is not a mountain climb. Success is a treadmill.

A girl doesn't need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot. Certainly I, at least, never have.

Besides, nobody ever loves you the way you want.

That's the thing about luxury, darlings. The moment you become accustomed to it, it is no longer a luxury but a necessity. People forget this.

weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations -- many of which they've been cultivating since the day you were born.

Approximately seventy percent of the female population is on a diet at any given time. More women diet than vote.

I'm aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I'd ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I've glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I've sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.

Everything became a metaphor, a talisman, a sign that I was still actually connected to people—that I wasn't so completely on my own.

Clowns—feh! All that ghastly, forced gaiety, worse than New Year's Eve.

One of the benefits of TM, Agatha had said, was that it enabled you to be "alone with your thoughts." But as I quickly discovered, a lot of my thoughts were not anything I wanted to be alone with.

Only the United States of America deemed ice cream "an essential item for troop morale." And so it alone continued producing, ordering ice cream freezers on submarines, ice cream freezers on tankers, ice cream freezers on cargo ships. Over the course of the war, the United States military became the largest ice cream manufacturer in history.

him lazy and stupid, they lashed his knuckles

age is so humiliating, darlings. After a while, there is simply no camouflaging your deterioration, and no one ever sees all the strengths you've acquired along the way.

You scare them, Ma," Isaac says. Why? Because I made them all sign confidentiality agreements? Because I speak my mind and know exactly what I want? Why should I pretend people are doing me a favor when I'm paying them? I have no use for that sort of nonsense. Once

Who the hell knows where they get these farkakte names for their kids. One of Rita's friends named her son Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva Rosenblatt. Can you imagine? Rita always says, 'It's no big deal. They call him 'Bodi', is all.' Please. And the newspapers say I'm abusive to children?

autumn of 1918, I had just started fifth grade when signs began popping up in windows and on doors, on broadsheets plastered on streetlamps around the neighborhood. Suddenly big public gatherings were being discouraged; taverns, moving-picture houses, soda fountains—even churches—grew empty. Nobody knew what it was exactly, except that it started quickly, with a cough and a fever.

I called her "the Chiquita Banana Lady" and I meant it as a compliment: who didn't want to look adorable with a pile of fruit on her head?

Weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations - many of which they've been cultivating since the day you were born.

Approximately seventy percent of the female population is on a diet at any given time. More women diet than vote.