Susan Jane Gilman Quotes & Sayings

him lazy and stupid, they lashed his knuckles — Susan Jane Gilman

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

Besides, nobody ever loves you the way you want. — Susan Jane Gilman

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

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

Fine watches, I'd been told, were like rich people themselves: You could barely discern them working. — Susan Jane Gilman

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

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? — Susan Jane Gilman

People are not sophisticated. They see dark, they think "bad," "shady," "untrustworthy." They see light, they think "clean," "pure," "fresh." Jason tells me this is racist. So sue me: I'm just saying what I've observed. In the ice cream industry, you always want your chocolate-based flavors to appear creamy, not earthy or bitter. Our Devil's Food Cake, our Molten Fudge, our Cocoa-Loco. Marvelous flavors, all of them, but most of them sat in the cases for weeks, slowly crystallizing. Vanilla, meanwhile, is the number-one-selling flavor in America. You can't tell me this is simply because of the taste. Not when you have rum raisin available. Or mint chip. Yet Aryanism still carries the day, darlings, even in the ice cream freezer. I don't like this any more than you do. But there it is. — Susan Jane Gilman

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

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

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. — Susan Jane Gilman

Happy hour?" Jason says. "It's barely noon, Grams"
"Oh, shush, you. You'll have some, yes?'
"Well"-he smiles slyly and wiggles his eyebrows-"if you insist". Every time, it's the same thing. Leaning in, he rubs his hands together expectantly. The drinking age in New York State was raised last year, so technically, I suppose, this is still illegal for my grandson. But the Jews didn't spend forty years wandering the desert so that I could forfeit a gin and tonic with my progeny ... — Susan Jane Gilman

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? — Susan Jane Gilman

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

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