Koren Quotes & Sayings

Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness. As dusk approaches in the hinterlands, a traveler ponders shelter for the night. He notices tall rushes growing everywhere, so he bundles an armful together as they stand in the field, and knots them at the top. Presto, a living grass hut. The next morning, before embarking on another day's journey, he unknots the rushes and presto, the hut de-constructs, disappears, and becomes a virtually indistinguishable part of the larger field of rushes once again. The original wilderness seems to be restored, but minute traces of the shelter remain. A slight twist or bend in a reed here and there. There is also the memory of the hut in the mind of the traveler - and in the mind of the reader reading this description. Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about these delicate traces, this faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness. — Leonard Koren

Pare down to the essence, but don't remove the poetry. — Leonard Koren

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

If you're not attempting to get someone to see, feel, think, or act in a particular manner, why bother communicating at all? — Leonard Koren

If it's something I feel I can do alright, I like being in those, and some that I think Schneider and Spade would be funnier at than me, I tell them to do it. I don't have any clue how we decide. There's this thing, this Click actually, one of my friends called me up, my partner told me about this idea that Steve Koren had. Steve Koren, by the way, the guy who wrote it with Mark O'Keefe, Steve Koren I've known since I was 22. He was a page at Saturday Night Live. — Adam Sandler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get rid of all that is unnecessary. Wabi-sabi means treading lightly on the planet and knowing how to appreciate whatever is encountered, no matter how trifling, whenever it is encountered. [ ... ] In other words, wabi-sabi tells us to stop our preoccupation with success
wealth, status, power, and luxury
and enjoy the unencumbered life. Obviously, leading the simple wabi-sabi life requires some effort and will and also some tough decisions. Wabi-sabi acknowledges that just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important to know when not to make choices: to let things be. Even at the most austere level of material existence, we still live in a world of things. Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom of things. — Leonard Koren

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

Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi-sabi is in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace. — Leonard Koren

For what good is a measure of success when purchased with the coins of error?" In — Daniel J. Koren

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

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

Things wabi-sabi have no need for the reassurance of status or the validation of market culture. They have no need for documentation of provenance. Wabi-sabi-ness in no way depends on knowledge of the creator's background or personality. In fact, it is best if the creator is no distinction, invisible, or anonymous. — Leonard Koren

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

Whether it's trying to convince others that something is more true, more virtuous, or more desirable
all communication is rhetoric in action. — Leonard Koren

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'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

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

Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist. When a person is hurt, his immune system comes into operation, and a self-healing process takes place, mental and physical." He called art "a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process. — Yehuda Koren

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

But when does something's destiny finally come to fruition? Is the plant complete when it flowers? When it goes to seed? When the seeds sprout? When everything turns into compost? — Leonard Koren

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

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

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