Laurie Notaro Quotes & Sayings

Are you kidding I was raised Catholic, my mom just came back from a Saint Francis Pilgrimage in Italy and bought a huge statue to prove it, big as you. Big as you. Catholics aren't like that, they can be a little slutty at times, sure and there's the pedophilia, but they aren't allowed to be strippers! It's not allowed! — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

Sure, I'd like to lose some weight, but a tapeworm is the last way I'd like to do it, except becoming a prisoner of war. — Laurie Notaro

There were times when, in her fury, she was convinced that she needed to drive down to Phoenix and let him know just how much of a bastard she thought he was, that he needed to know just what he had done. But she eventually realized that with his resounding, silent indifference, nothing she could possibly say would matter to him, and by the same account, he didn't deserve to understand how angry he had made her.
He wasn't good enough to know how much she hated him. — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

You are basically a flophouse and a pimp away from Pepcid rehab, you know that? I informed Nana. — Laurie Notaro

I have more faith in my bra than I have in my accountant. — Laurie Notaro

Suddenly, however, the dastardly department of my personality presented two plans, one of which involved dynamite, mustache wax, some rope, and train tracks ... which I rejected due to financial investment. — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

Once I had been jerked back to reality, like I was in a log on Splash Mountain and someone quickly applied the brakes, I knew this had been a terrible choice, but I was in it now. There was no getting out; there was no abandoning the mission. — Laurie Notaro

Asininity was puddling all around me in quantities too vast to soak up. - It Looked Different on the Model — Laurie Notaro

It's a well-known fact that black sheep should never have lambs. You know what you get when you take a black sheep and give it a lamb? You get a thing called "supervised visitation" that's what. — Laurie Notaro

Goddamnit I've never been the "pretty friend ... " She's the one who wears the perfect eyeliner, it never gathers like a crowd in her tear ducts to create a grapefruit-size ebony eye booger. The one who can wear a bodysuit, sit down in it, and not have rolls of fat cascading over her belt. The one who can eat a sandwich or hamburger and not wind up with lipstick on the bun or on her chin. The one who can actually eat in front of other people and not have food, like coleslaw, hanging from her lip or shooting out of her mouth, landing on the plates of other diners. She never spits when she talks. She sleeps with her mouth shut and never drools. She doesn't pick at her face. And she never, ever has to take a shit. — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

As soon as Nicholas was born, my mother swore she'd rather see her daughters become Jehovah's Witnesses or pole dancers before she saw her first grandchild in daycare when my sister went back to work. I don't think it was originally the idea of daycare that didn't sit well with her but the fact that there, in a bassinet, was a fresh slate, a lump of clay that could be worked on and molded into the perfect child who had eluded her the first time around with her own daughters. — Laurie Notaro

Is it just another pore expanding? God, I already have pores the size of pudding cups, that's the last thing I need, another pore ... to fill in with spackle. — Laurie Notaro

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 — Laurie Notaro

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

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

The lesson here is that a giant cupcake tattoo is typically an indication of two things: (1) Sister go her hands on some crystal meth, and (2) Sister smoked that crystal meth and kept smoking it until she had been awake for seven days and then stumbled into a tattoo parlor with a really bad idea that she had quickly sketched on a napkin from Carl's Jr. — Laurie Notaro

It's a proclamation he regards as complete absolution from answering ... as if his last name was Bush, he was eighteen, and there was a draft going on. — Laurie Notaro

Be honest with yourself; set the alarm for the time the Real You will get up, not the Ambitious You, because the Ambitious You doesn't really exist. — Laurie Notaro

As a result of that experience, I do think all Anthropologies should provide a courtesy volcano just outside their dressing rooms so every woman who is revealed as completely inadequate by the lighting can throw herself in rather than contaminate the store staging for any longer than absolutely necessary. — Laurie Notaro

It's okay," my husband said, shuffling toward his study. "I bought an electric-powered chain saw with a plug-in cord so if I run away fast enough, you can only chase me so far. — Laurie Notaro

If another person got on that elevator to travel eight feet upward, I couldn't have been responsible for what I did. I had been pushed to the limit. The next time it happens, I swore to myself, I'm going to reach out and pinch that One Floorer and say, You get out there and walk! You won't come close to burning a fraction of the three thousand calories you ate at lunch, but maybe by the time you reach the landing, you'll pass out from exhaustion and get to go home for the rest of the day, you lazy little asshole, because that's exactly what you want anyway! — Laurie Notaro

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? — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

It was the gift that every girl dreams of, to be dead long enough for your parents to realize how meaningless their lives were without you, how they were suddenly and at once deeply sorrowed at all of the horrible injustices they caused you, how they had truly never appreciated your natural gifts of beauty and grace, being that their beautiful angel would have such a short time on earth and should have spent that time driving the restored 1965 convertible Mustang she had openly AND PUBLICLY desired. But nope, she spent her last, short, fleeting moments driving a 1980 Chevy Citation, every so clearly a GRANDMA car, with fake red-velvet upholstery, a hatchback, and an interior that smelled like spoiled milk and sometimes meat. Being temporarily run over by a car was the best present I had ever received, and I didn't even have to do anything dramatic to get it, like write a note or buy some rope. — Laurie Notaro

How could I compete with that? Candies and toys! I had string and glue and some very complicated dynamics going on at my station. I mean, when I was assigned to that table, no one happened to mention that it was a simmering hotbed of political unrest concerning the lower case r. A wicked web indeed. — Laurie Notaro

If you really want to be afraid for mankind, you don't even need to know who Paul Ryan is. All you have to do is lurk for five minutes by the pharmacy. — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and serves as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I'd rather forget. — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of your body the day after you eat it. — Laurie Notaro

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

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

Oh, boy. Now you see what you've done, Monica Lewinsky, you stupid, stupid tart, I thought. Because of you, I have to explain to my Nana, while she's in a hospital bed with an enlarged gallbladder, what oral sex is. Do you see the damage you've caused? Do you see where your sinful path has led? — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

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? — Laurie Notaro

Okay, okay,' I said to my husband as he picked up a food dehydrator off the table and shot me a look. 'Maybe I did get carried away. Maybe the world won't end in a year, maybe it won't end until 2028, when the Aztec calendar stops.'
'The Bugles will be very old by then,' my husband said. 'They will have lost their snappy crunch.'
'They weren't to eat,' I said. 'They were to put on our fingers and poke the eyes out of looters. — Laurie Notaro

Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching
and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book. — Laurie Notaro

If there was a National Tweaker Olympics, Oregon would bring home the gold in every category (Living in Squalor, Poisoning Your Neighbors, Developing Facial Scabs, Public Aggression, Theft of Useless Things, Taking Stuff Apart, and Crazy Talking). — Laurie Notaro

Poor Holly. There she was, completely unaware while millions of minute mucus particles, each carrying the flu virus, exploded into the air like rain. It was their germ mission to land on her and try to find their way into an opening of her body, much like a date I once had attempted with me. — Laurie Notaro

Have you ever held a gun before?" the lady whom I was meeting with asked me.
No, n,: I siad with a little nervous laugh, feeling a little underqualified for the job. "My family were staunch believers in physical violence, not automatic violence, and we had a Safeway around the corner, so we never really needed to kill anything. — Laurie Notaro

I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them. — Laurie Notaro

Come on, give me a shimmy!" Ruby screeched from the couch as she ground out one cigarette and then lit another. "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! — Laurie Notaro

Weddings, I began to understand, were vile, filthy things when they ran amuck. — Laurie Notaro

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. — Laurie Notaro

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

If you really believe in what you're doing, work hard, take nothing personally and if something blocks one route, find another. Never give up. — Laurie Notaro

I'm nicer on tax day than I am when I'm on deadline. — Laurie Notaro

I realized that you don't try on a pair of pants, fart in them, and then put them back on the shelf, and the same rough politeness applied here, too. Plain and simple, I bled on it, I bought it. — Laurie Notaro

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

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. — Laurie Notaro