Koren Zailckas Quotes

As long as we depend on other women for self-esteem, using them as bad examples or fantasy versions - special, powerful - of ourselves, they remain stuck in a narcissistic version of themselves, too.

What makes a narcissistic mother so scary? Her absolute power and controlling influence. A narcissistic mother is your only 'friend,' at least until you're old enough to go to school.

It's no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she's a freak of nature.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

But lately, when I'm drunk, I feel a hostility that I've never known before. It is a tension deep in my gut that makes me want to yell until my face is red, knock over glasses with the back of my hand, and kick people I don't know in the shins.

Sociopaths have no conscience. Narcissists have no empathy. Neither one thinks other people are real. Narcissists think other people are just ego food, tools or extensions of themselves.

That's the thing about social drinking: In the end, it's the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you're there, really there inside that moment, with its neighbourly warmth and conversation, it's hard to tell what's responsible for producing emotion. What's responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who's running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you're drunk, or because you're connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced?

My short stature may have something to do with my tendency to shout when enraged. How else is anyone going to hear me way down here?

For the first month of school, writing is its own upper. Pounding on my computer keys feels like playing the piano, like arranging words into harmony that sings back to me.

Violet remembered that slap; later her mother had called it a "love tap," as if to further confuse love with pain.

I do think anger is so difficult for women. Girls think it undermines their femininity; it's not very ladylike.

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.

Crushes weren't a precursor to love, they were a precursor to having your heart chewed up like Shark Week.

I've been thinking I'd like to be Daisy; I'd like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

I think when you're 14 years old, I think you're sort of looking for markers that prove you're an adult and you're independent of your parents.

America, ever the narcissistic mother, prefers baby bumps to children and expectant mothers to full-fledged bum-and-nose-wiping ones.

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.

In my early to mid-20s, a fear of confrontation made it difficult for me to end relationships in a mature or even quasi-sane way. Instead, I would hang on resentfully, praying that my doomed beau would end things first and spare me the displeasure. To add hindrance to hang-up, the men I chose were usually just as stoic as I was.

My parents always swore that in my childhood they had to let me win at board games. If, by the lucky stroke of the plastic wheel, my father would accidentally beat me at Candy Land, I would fly into fits of bawling that I'm told would last for hours. If I couldn't triumph, I didn't want to play.

If mothers are our first teachers, then having a narcissistic one teaches us that human closeness is terrifying, and the world is a heartless, inconsistent place.

I think, for one, we have to really accept that anger is a normal human emotion that can be a positive force for change.

Reading Poe was like a near-death experience, the kind that makes you feel fragile and free in its wake. I felt almost as though I'd scared myself alive.

I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight ... I agree.

I can't help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

By the same token, I think it's time that we allow ourselves to experience real anger as women. And I don't mean that passive aggressive dance that we've employed for too many years. It's not real anger if it is implied or a few degrees removed, if it takes the form of whispering, or cold shoulders, or silent treatment. Real anger is what popular culture would have us be afraid of, based on the fact that it is not courteous, elegant, or feminine.

I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

For the next four years, they will again and again tout themselves as "real" and I will be too naïve to know that anyone who uses that designation is disguising a representation of immense falsity

It doesn't occur to me that alcohol might be unhinging me, that drinking at the rate I am can induce depression, impulsive behaviour, and symptoms of bipolar and borderline personality disorder.

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

One night, Tess finds me sobbing during the health segment of the evening news. Scientists have discovered scarred cells from cardiac arrest fall away over time, and she can't understand how sadly hopeful that is. To me, it means that the human heart has the capacity to heal itself.

Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance.