Koren Zailckas Quotes & Sayings

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

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama. — Koren Zailckas

What makes a narcissistic mother so scary? Her absolute power and controlling influence. A narcissistic mother is your only 'friend,' at least until you're old enough to go to school. — Koren Zailckas

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, a person might tell you I look much more like a woman subdued. — Koren Zailckas

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

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. — Koren Zailckas

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. — Koren Zailckas

I'm trying to figure out precisely which character flaw might be responsible for my latest life failure. — Koren Zailckas

Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance. — Koren Zailckas

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

Having a child doesn't make a woman a mother any more than owning a paintbrush makes her Frida Kahlo. — Koren Zailckas

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, I would hang on resentfully, praying that my doomed beau would end things first and spare me the displeasure. To add hindrance to hang-up, the men I chose were usually just as stoic as I was. — Koren Zailckas

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers. — Koren Zailckas

But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous. — Koren Zailckas

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 sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit
and eventually a profession
of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged. — Koren Zailckas

Violet remembered that slap; later her mother had called it a "love tap," as if to further confuse love with pain. — Koren Zailckas

My parents always swore that in my childhood they had to let me win at board games. If, by the lucky stroke of the plastic wheel, my father would accidentally beat me at Candy Land, I would fly into fits of bawling that I'm told would last for hours. If I couldn't triumph, I didn't want to play. — Koren Zailckas

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 here? — Koren Zailckas

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. — Koren Zailckas

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

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 seeking out our other half. A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am wanting; I feel half finished. — Koren Zailckas

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. — Koren Zailckas

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 harmony that sings back to me. — Koren Zailckas

We are taught to believe it's bad to be angry, or at least it's not good. That's not the case all throughout the world. People are more open and not embarrassed about it. For instance in Paris, people believe Americans have a really unhealthy relation with anger. They think it's essential to get angry. — Koren Zailckas

I think when you're 14 years old, I think you're sort of looking for markers that prove you're an adult and you're independent of your parents. — Koren Zailckas

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again. — Koren Zailckas

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. — 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? — Koren Zailckas

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 place. — Koren Zailckas

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. — Koren Zailckas

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

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. — Koren Zailckas

Like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae. — Koren Zailckas

I have been a ballerina, a cheerleader and a sorority girl. I was the girliest girl alive. — Koren Zailckas

Since I've quit drinking, I'm not sure I've found the good life, but I've certainly uncovered a better one. — Koren Zailckas

I can't help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude. — Koren Zailckas

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. — Koren Zailckas

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. — Koren Zailckas

Reading Poe was like a near-death experience, the kind that makes you feel fragile and free in its wake. I felt almost as though I'd scared myself alive. — Koren Zailckas

I do think anger is so difficult for women. Girls think it undermines their femininity; it's not very ladylike. — Koren Zailckas

I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight ... I agree. — Koren Zailckas

I think what I learned in research is that as Americans, we're very distrustful of anger. We're not sure if we should repress it. The idea that anger is supposed to be controlled is American, and we try to keep it out of our homes. — Koren Zailckas

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 full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings. Afterward, we withdrew from one another and tried our best to strike the event from our memories. — Koren Zailckas

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 — Koren Zailckas

That's the thing about social drinking: In the end, it's the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you're there, really there inside that moment, with its neighbourly warmth and conversation, it's hard to tell what's responsible for producing emotion. What's responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who's running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you're drunk, or because you're connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced? — Koren Zailckas

It's no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she's a freak of nature. — Koren Zailckas

Why is Kris Jenner a powerhouse? Because some part of us confuses fame and infamy, too. If she really bothered us half as much as we claim she does, we'd look away and stop feeding her empire. — Koren Zailckas

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. — Koren Zailckas

As long as we depend on other women for self-esteem, using them as bad examples or fantasy versions - special, powerful - of ourselves, they remain stuck in a narcissistic version of themselves, too. — Koren Zailckas

I think, for one, we have to really accept that anger is a normal human emotion that can be a positive force for change. — Koren Zailckas

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 dreaming of me — Koren Zailckas