Big Brother Quotes
"It follows, then, that film, affinity, and education are more important to me than stuffing my face."
"The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one."
"We are animals; far more than the ancillary matter of sex, the drive to eat motivates nearly all of human endeavor."
"Having conspicuously triumphed in the competition for resources, the fleshiest among us are therefore towering biological success stories."
"But ask any herd of overpopulating deer: nature punishes success."
"That is why I cast doubt on whether the pantry, as a subject, is paltry."
"The joys of obscurity were my own discovery. Like everyone else in L.A., I was raised to regard being a nobody as a death."
"If glutinous with corn syrup, the pie was already baked; besides, look at him: what difference did it make?"
"I didn’t want anyone smoking around the kids."
"When your mother dies, you want the loss to mean something, reprieving grief from its purest, most intolerable form, in which there is only loss, with no compensation, no takeaway."
"But flesh-and-blood family works in only one direction."
"What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you."
"You have to provide Iowans good reason to be unkind, and if anything a conspicuous weakness for pork rinds made my nightclubbing East Coast brother seem more down-home."
"Responsibility, once assumed, cannot be readily repudiated—not without doing so much damage in the process of its abdication that you might better have never assumed the responsibility in the first place."
"When people get upset, they say things they don't mean."
"I was the middle child, the stepmother, until recently the mere caterer of other people’s grand occasions."
"The very fact that Edison was afraid to tell you about the damage suggests he does know how much it means to you."
"I’m not proud of myself, or I am, but not for my weight. Still, when I polish off a doughnut, that’s not doing anything to you."
"Your look-the-other-way routine doesn’t drop his weight an ounce."
"The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter."
"I’m not the same size I was when we got married, and you know it."
"I’m not leaving anyone. I’m taking some time out from one family to attend to another."
"I’m sorry your brother is fat. I’m sorry he’s still fat—or ‘big,’ as you’ve started to say, as if that’s any different."
"I could hardly show up in Cedar Rapids and say, ‘Hi, it’s your big brother, I’ve come to stay for the rest of my life,’ now could I?"
"The will is a muscle. Yours is flabby as the rest of you, bro."
"Your blood pressure is elevated. At a BMI of over fifty-five, your chances of getting most cancers are significantly raised."
"From what I’ve read, we’d eventually have to step it up to eight hundred, then twelve hundred. But to start with, between five and six hundred calories a day."
"Three-eighty-six. My brother added, 'But that’s including boxers.'"
"I wondered if there was a civil rights issue we might have pressed."
"Driving around with Edison, I was glad for familiar landmarks that might ground my brother and make him feel at home."
"Dennis Novacek had a clubby quality, and noticeably brightened on encountering a would-be renter even bigger than he was."
"The only thing that bugged me a little was his neglecting to correct Novacek’s misapprehension that Edison and I were married."
"The more I focused on my brother, the less I suffered myself."
"I’m tryin’, man, I’m tryin’! But I gotta set the table, if you know what I’m sayin’."
"Word to the wise: anyone on an all-liquid diet should play an instrument, and I regretted playing nothing myself."
"You burn less energy as you get thinner. It’s an algorithm."
"The piano was more involving than television, and Edison would hit the keyboard after work the way he used to hit the pantry."
"My growing affinity for jazz was genuine enough, but I can’t tell you the relief of getting a break."
"Eradicating the froufrou of hospitality stripped away the chitchat, too—about weather and new shoes."
"Sometimes I don’t have anything to say, so I don’t say it. Unlike most people."
"What’s wrong with being ‘withdrawn’? Big deal, sometimes I don’t have anything to say, so I don’t say it."
"If Edison had an 'addictive personality', he was now addicted to Upchuck."
"Once you’ve messed up as badly as you did, and made food into this personal pitfall, eating is never going to be the same again."
"Eating nothing is easy. Eating something but not very much is an everloving bitch."
"In depriving himself these many months, Edison was exploding with the need to satisfy somebody."
"A slender figure therefore joined career success in its so-whatness."
"I didn’t have the flair for an eating disorder."
"It’s easier to be perfect than only a little bad. I’m starting to see the attraction of monasteries."
"I felt as if any day now I’d be able to fly. He wasn’t being fair, and he was trying to take something from me."
"Everything might have gone off the rails with Fletcher, even without Prague Porches."
"I wasn’t about to throw up. I was hungry."
"I never knew my brother very well. I remained in awe of the man from a distance."
"It is impossible to gauge what you owe people."
"I could not have said, 'I will help you lose weight for three months, but not for four.'"
"The word 'disappointment' doesn't begin to cover it. However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse."
"In the end, I can contribute only one small thought: We are meant to be hungry."
"What killed him was one of those hospital infections. But then, the overtaxing of a body weakens the immune system."
"As soon as you begin to calculate the amount you're obliged to give, you're done for."
"Having dodged paying the piper while Edison was still alive, I pay now instead."