I Know I Am, But What Are You? Quotes
"Every once in a while I think about what my life would be like if my parents had stayed together and not separated while I was still a baby."
"I come from a long, magnificent tradition of divorce, dating back to the time when nobody was doing it."
"The women in my family were often suspected of this kind of sluttery, but the glorious truth is that they mostly just loved to marry sadists."
"Dating from well before the turn of the twentieth century if there has ever been a successful, happy marriage in my family lineage, I have yet to hear about it."
"My grandmother had been raised during the time of polio, so to her, every other child was just an infected mucus machine gunning for her precious only grandchild."
"I’m pretty sure my stepmom suspected that I thought I was better than everybody else, but actually, what I suffered from was acute and crippling shyness."
"I didn’t want to tell them, because I didn’t want them to feel bad about having missed the opportunity to teach me something, but I was already quite acquainted with the regular facts of life, and perhaps even more so with some of the irregular facts of life."
"But after so many rainy days of observation, I was starting to doubt that they were up to the task as a couple anyway."
"Not liking hot ham doesn’t make a person a freak. In my opinion, it makes a person seem sensible and capable of discernment."
"I was a scary teenager. A very scary one, in fact, whose multifaceted awfulness soured parental relations well into my twenties, and whose indiscretions are still occasionally brought up to punish me now that I am in my forties."
"You better get in it to win it, or your so-called drugs are just going to wake me up and make me feel refreshed."
"For all of the random fears that ruled my life... nowhere in my tortured psyche was there anything about being assaulted in an apartment by two strange men who had fed me drugs."
"I didn’t know where I was, couldn’t see a phone anywhere in the apartment, and had no money in my wallet for a taxi."
"I made it home on time, put on my flannel Little House on the Prairie-style nightgown, and settled in for a night of virginity and being thirteen years old."
"I think we can all agree that most people enjoy getting a massage."
"My hands are incapable of convincingly sensual touch."
"Sometimes old people look at me, then they scan down to my hands, and they give me a kind of 'what's up' look, like we're the same."
"A person can get away with anything if they’re dressed well and act like they belong, even when they don’t."
"If you were rich enough to own one car, surely you could get another. I mean, these things were insured, right? Big deal!"
"Everyone knew and appreciated how precious and unique it was to have a hotel room to party in."
"There’s really nothing creepier than going somewhere with one of your parents and having people think you are together, as a couple."
"But when you see the look of disgust that creeps across their faces as your dad says goodbye to you, planting his chappy dad-lips on yours... Oh, God."
"I wasn’t prepared to think about things like ulcers."
"The surest sign that you are too old to date a young person is when you start incessantly talking about your hips."
"I should have known things weren’t going to work out for me and Jim."
"Most of which I thought were lying dormant inside of me due to my shabby living situation."
"I tried so hard to fall in love with him, but it was just impossible."
"Whenever I spent time with Jim, I felt hunger emanating from him."
"I’m sure that in his day, his breath was sweet and his hair lush."
"Once you’ve got old-man stink on you, it’s tough to get off."
"Fifty-odd years of living does a lot of damage to a gut."
"Young people don’t usually have to think about their hips."
"People do all sorts of things to benefit humankind."
"Formerly a person of good taste, I found myself falling in love with anything framed."
"I had to have been the only applicant, right?"
"Getting something for nothing is kind of a pet project for my father."
"My dad searches for shortcuts to wealth."
"Jobs I have considered: professional jewelry thief, professional auto thief and jewelry fence, lawyer, drug dealer, high-priced stripper, high-priced hooker."
"I don’t have the kind of single-minded dedication to my pets that my mother has."
"Raccoons in the house are cute at first."
"There’s nothing quite like getting up in the middle of the night to pee and finding a fifteen-pound baby raccoon drinking out of the toilet."
"It’s horrible when animals try to have sex with you."
"I had done it! I had outshone even my mother with my command over the animal kingdom."
"I was convinced she was saying, 'Shoot her in the head!'"
"I had finally found someone who shared my warped values."
"The first morning that we woke up after Ryan moved in, I found Meredith fluttering around the kitchen wearing red lipstick, humming to herself, and whipping up a frittata."
"I soured on his unattracted-to-me-ness quickly."
"Hadn’t he noticed the charming sign I had posted above the light switch that read 'KITCHEN’S CLOSED; THIS CHICK’S EGGS-AUSTED' with the picture of the tired-looking chicken wiping her sweaty brow?"
"He got all of his groceries at a secondhand store that stockpiled only previously rejected canned goods."
"I could tell that she was imagining me as a much more physically attractive person than I actually was."
"How do you figure they got those gurr-bulls to act so good?"
"There’s no such thing as a gurr-bull ... it’s gerbil. And they look nothing like that. They’re like mice."
"I was desperate for her to realize how little there was beneath his chiseled surface."
"Remember that show That’s Amazing? What a show ... what a show. I’ll never forget the story of this one man—it was incredible."
"He then went on to list every food item that the waiter had been required to remember."
"Sorry I’m just so busy and scatterbrained! I totally forgot I’m supposed to shave Ryan’s balls tonight—I don’t know if he’s going to be able to make your gay poetry jam after all!"
"Every year on December 1, I run out and spend about twelve hundred million thousand dollars making the gifts I have bought look like they leapt out of the pages of Persnickety Old Opera-Loving Gay Man’s Quarterly."
"If you give me a turquoise, size-sixteen, funnel-neck sweatshirt with three-quarter-length sleeves and a relief portrait of rabbits frolicking in the snow, then I know you didn’t really want to bother getting me something in the first place."
I don’t want a gift. I repeat, I don’t need a gift. Honestly. It’s more insulting to me that you would wrap the cardigan of a dead person eight sizes larger than me and try to pass it off as something I would wear than if you just said, "We’re not doing gifts this year."
"That young man is too simple to pound sand."