Koren Zailckas > Koren's Quotes

“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, Fury: A Memoir

“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, Fury: A Memoir

“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

“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, Fury: A Memoir

“These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Such narrowly missed human connection as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who's at fault, and often results in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that 'the whole goddamn thing's not worth bothering with or it wouldn't be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,' after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”
― Anne Sexton

“To me at least, poetry like love- implies a magical approach to life, quite different from the presently accepted rational way of looking at the world.
That is, poetry brings out life's little nuances. It delights in forming correspondences between events that seem quite seperate to the intellectually-tuned conciousness alone, and reveals undercurrents of usually -concealed actions that we quite ignore when we're most concerned about thinking rationally. Actually, that kind of vision contains it's own spontaneous rationality, and often supplies us with answers more satisfying than purely intellectual ones-”
― Jane Roberts

“Love is proved the moment you let go of someone because they need you to.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will require all of your energy.

It's you who has to hold on to earth. You have to tighten your grip -- which means letting go of him.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Nothing you become will disappoint me; I have no preconception that I'd like to see you be or do. I have no desire to forsee you, only to discover you. You can't disappoint me”
― Mary Haskell