Mennonite In A Little Black Dress: A Memoir Of Going Home Quotes
"The truth started to sink in: Pee bag. Tube. I kept watching bubbles drift down the tube, thinking: I am peeing. Right now. At this very moment."
"But in the weeks before the surgery my depression mechanism continued to fail me. I remained in a state of suspicious good cheer, like my mother, who had also sustained the trial of early menopause."
"I've always been a bit of a late bloomer, a slow learner. The postman has to ring twice, if you get my drift."
"In general, Nick's policy was, if you haven't used it in a year, throw it out."
"I am woman, hear me pee! That is, hear me empty the pee bag into a plastic basin that is too heavy for me to lift!"
"I lay there doing nothing, unless you count peeing, which was an ongoing activity."
"I'm happy to report that I made a full recovery from the netherworld of tube and clamp."
That's true," I said, much struck. "None of the local diners appreciated the head wound, but everybody thinks it's just fine to breast-feed in public! If women can whip out a big milky nipple, maybe I can flaunt my pee tube.
"And dang, I'm here to tell you that when it's ninety degrees outside, nothing reminds you of your own mortality like a steaming hot bag of urine hugging your thigh."
"It's better, for instance, than quadriplegia. I had great friends, a husband, and a cat. Large-sized diaper products, although hazardous to the environment and destined for decades in the landfill, were cheap."
"The more educated a person is, the more warped." - Ji jileada, ji vikjeada
"I know only that I know nothing at all." - Socrates
"That's okay. You're a good person anyway."
"Why should God grant one request when another supplicant is asking for the opposite?"
"I'll start taking medication for my bipolarity when the rest of the world starts taking medication for its stupidity."
"I. Don't. Care. What. Happens. To. You. Anymore."
"But now she had asked point-blank, and I had to 'fess up to the book-learnin'."
"You just tell them you've had a family emergency."
"It's just a little soldier standing on a hill making potato salad in his pants."
"Why are there cool ranch chips in the world? It's a question for the philosophers, like the ongoing presence of evil."
"Would I, to save myself a marriage shadowed by suicide, grief, and despair?"
"Dude, I don't know what these fuckers are, but they're amazing!"
"So what if I mix the food of shame with the fruit of knowledge? In the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in the Garden, shame comes inevitably with knowledge. Knowledge actually causes shame."
"On the chorus everybody joined in, as if by prearrangement. And they sang with gusto. People were waving their lighters. The folks standing in the back clasped their arms about each other's waists and swayed, as in old-time movies."
"You can tell a lot about a person's family of origin by examining the elimination vocabulary of the parents."
"The plan was that Lola and I would lure Milla into the sixth graders' hall at recess. At a prearranged time Milt Perko, the class goofball, would approach us. Milt Perko, desktop farter, snapper of bras, purveyor of dirty jokes!"
"Middle age is all about learning to live with ambiguity."
"As a child, I wanted so badly to dance that once I told my Sunday-school class I was going to be on television that very night, tap-dancing on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour."
"I wasn't exactly a Single Woman of God, but hey, I could quote scripture."
"We hugged. I introduced Mitch, mentally willing him not to inquire about the status of my friends' salvation."
"Old folks like Leona may be a bit literal in their beliefs, but God does work in miraculous and magnificent ways."
"I used to think that virtuous people, for instance nuns, or even my mother, existed as a kind of Darwinian opposite to pederasts and serial killers."
"Virtue isn't a condition of character. It's an elected action. It's a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we'll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness."
"There are many paths to virtue, many ways of creating the patterns of behavior that result in habitual resistance to human badness."
"We can't measure the existence of supernatural beings any more than we can control our partners. What I want to measure, what I can control, is my own response to life's challenges."
"This is why I say: Let husbands ditch their wives for guys named Bob. Let Bob dump our husbands for reasons we still haven't heard. Let the angels promenade upon our walls."
"Sometimes, we feel confused and broken. Sometimes, we have a hard time leaving relationships that are hurtful. Sometimes, we do the hurting. Sometimes, we do the leaving. Sometimes, we are left. Sometimes, we leave and feel bad about it. Sometimes, we leave and feel good about it. And that's okay!"
"I always assumed that bipolar folks were missing some crucial fuse in their anger-management system-that their inner thermometer was set a shade too high."
"It's when you don't love somebody that you do notice the little things. Then you mind them. You mind them terribly."
"God might even fancy a skort. I usually leave speculation of this sort to folks like my mother, who seemed to know."
"I don't know if it's possible for a thirty-plus adult to experience saltatory ideological change. I want to know if they think we can change our core assumptions about what we believe. About how we believe."
"In the twilight the lights from the dam on the far shore would suddenly breathe life into the gathering gloom, and the tiny glowing pinpricks of light grew dear to me."