Carlene Bauer Quotes & Sayings

But I couldn't quite believe that sex was the motivating force behind all human behavior, and that I was left out of the great cultural conversation because I had not been initiated into the mystery. — Carlene Bauer

To be Catholic was to belong to an ethnic group, not a religion. You didn't really have to believe it, or act like you believed it, to be a Catholic. You just had to show up every week for Mass and go to Catholic school. — Carlene Bauer

I am in no mood to fulminate on paper
I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth. — Carlene Bauer

But women are awful for the same reason men are awful: limited scope. — Carlene Bauer

It makes me think that a marriage of true minds - to again quote Shakespeare - is in many ways just dumb luck. — Carlene Bauer

I filled out my workbooks, read through the Bible, and learned hardly anything of academic worth during my year and a half at this first Christian school ... What they really meant to teach us at this school was that the world was a poxed and pustuled old thing, diseased by our pride and greed, headed for destruction. — Carlene Bauer

My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair - the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure. — Carlene Bauer

I had started to believe that I might love her in some way. I came to her room late at night once when I was drunk, shouting, throwing myself at her because I wanted her to respect me more that I thought she did. I wanted her to want me more than she did- I mean, I didn't want her to look at me as if I were a child, I wanted her to look at me with hunger. — Carlene Bauer

Our second Christian school was a real school, not a bunker for indoctrination. — Carlene Bauer

Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you're thinking bloom upon your face, and I can't think of anything else I'd rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather. — Carlene Bauer

You and I are so different: I am one word at a time one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how surely footing is before proceeding to the next sentence with ruminative breaks for buttered toast and coffee. — Carlene Bauer

Dear Uncle Bernard -
Your niece Frances - a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of h baby fat - thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I've never been one to spend time thinking about why men and women take to each other, or why they don't. I think it can turn a lady neurotic, a term I despise but also am loath to have turned in my direction. — Carlene Bauer

The Beats are really nothing more than a troop of malevolent Boy Scouts trying to earn badges for cultural arson. — Carlene Bauer

Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It's the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson - American dynamism gilded onto a platform of individual redemption. It's religion as detergent. — Carlene Bauer