I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays Quotes
"The ponies, if by accident, have come to represent the most overtly sentimental part of my life."
"If I die tomorrow, I hope my living friends and family make such practical use of my demise."
"It's like watching some brilliant independent film where there are no cuts and no scene changes, only a wagon and a little thing called destiny."
"Oregon Trail, which provided me with the illusion I was actually going somewhere."
"The second the doors shut, I realize what I have done. Actually, that's not true. The second the doors shut, I feel great. Sneaky and great and nostalgia-free."
"For me, Oregon Trail was a private affair—something I engaged in after dinner when I was supposed to be doing homework."
"I was a good girl from the suburbs, where self-worth was color-coded and bound and crazy-glued into a diorama."
"I was besieged by the sinking feeling that it had been over a year since I’d read a book in its entirety. I was a fraud."
"This is New York, I reasoned with myself. This is the price you pay."
"Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there."
"People are less quick to applaud as you grow older."
"If remembering you had to be somewhere else could take the shape of a person, it would be a mugger in an alley."
"It's like meeting someone for the first time after hearing their voice on the phone—before you met them you’d have said you had no particular image of them; afterward, you inevitably say you imagined them looking different."
"Sometimes we don’t know what we want until we don’t get it."
"We were disillusioned by day and deglamorized by night."
"I will take the last square of toilet paper off the roll without thinking twice."
"Perhaps it's simply that niceness has always been New York’s best-kept secret, kept quiet to keep the tourists out."
"The funny thing is, I get the impression that neither she nor my father actually liked Diamond Head very much."
"I have often wondered how I would have turned out had I finished my teenagehood down under."
"In my world the cool kids were rich, poor, smart, black, white. As long as you did drugs and were relatively attractive, you were okay."
"I spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen to me, which is more or less as pathetic as it sounds."
"At the end of the day, I rushed for the door, an anxious expression applied to my face."
"This was like the opening of Pandora’s box, the eating of God’s apple, the crossing of the streams in Ghostbusters."
"It was unfair: I had already decided to put the kibosh on my days as a volunteer."
"The butterfly winked at me gingerly, opening its wings for a moment and then leisurely letting them shut."
"Many of the poisonous ones aren’t born poisonous."
"You can’t pick your girlfriend’s teeth, but you sure as shit can pick your girlfriends."
"The night before I turned sixteen, I was digging through my mother’s jewelry box."
"My mother’s was an ironclad logic, impossible to penetrate."
"A fundamental like for your other guests, because they are among your oldest friends."
"But shit on the carpet is so outlandish—so potentially hostile—suffice it to say, no one, but no one, is used to being questioned about it."
"People tend to comment on how small your bathroom is. They usually say something like, 'Your bathroom is really small.'"
"There’s no such thing as too much chocolate."
"Some people are not tolerant of lactose. Good to know if I do this again."
"You could always make cakes. You’re a dessert snob."
"I’m not a very good vegetarian anymore. There, I said it."
"I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, then it became a moral choice, and now it’s just to annoy people."
"The only reason opening someone’s refrigerator is more socially acceptable than opening someone’s medicine cabinet is that people keep beer in their refrigerator."
"Being a vegan is more like the dietary equivalent of being a transsexual. Acceptance isn’t quite as contagious as it should be."
"I cracked like a rice cake and inhaled an entire box of fluorescent mac and cheese."
"Medically, my new problem and my old were completely unrelated. But now, sitting in these waiting room bucket seats... I could hear the voice-over: 'Imagine you had one week to live. What would you do?'"