Susan Jane Gilman Quotes

Besides, nobody ever loves you the way you want.

That's the thing about luxury, darlings. The moment you become accustomed to it, it is no longer a luxury but a necessity. People forget this.

Who the hell knows where they get these farkakte names for their kids. One of Rita's friends named her son Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva Rosenblatt. Can you imagine? Rita always says, 'It's no big deal. They call him 'Bodi', is all.' Please. And the newspapers say I'm abusive to children?

Approximately seventy percent of the female population is on a diet at any given time. More women diet than vote.

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen. I wanted to be everything at once: a prima ballerina, an actress, a model, a famous artist, a nurse, an Ice Capades dancer, and Batgirl. I spent inordinate amounts of time waltzing around our living room with a doily on my head, imagining in great detail my promenade down the runway as the new Miss America, during which time I would also happen to receive a Nobel Prize for coloring.

I called her "the Chiquita Banana Lady" and I meant it as a compliment: who didn't want to look adorable with a pile of fruit on her head?

Sure, beauty has the power to excite men. But so does a box of donuts.

People are not sophisticated. They see dark, they think "bad," "shady," "untrustworthy." They see light, they think "clean," "pure," "fresh." Jason tells me this is racist. So sue me: I'm just saying what I've observed. In the ice cream industry, you always want your chocolate-based flavors to appear creamy, not earthy or bitter. Our Devil's Food Cake, our Molten Fudge, our Cocoa-Loco. Marvelous flavors, all of them, but most of them sat in the cases for weeks, slowly crystallizing. Vanilla, meanwhile, is the number-one-selling flavor in America. You can't tell me this is simply because of the taste. Not when you have rum raisin available. Or mint chip. Yet Aryanism still carries the day, darlings, even in the ice cream freezer. I don't like this any more than you do. But there it is.

I'm aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I'd ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I've glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I've sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.

Everybody thinks that once you reach the top, you can lie back on a divan with a goddamn mai tai. No. Wrong. Success is not a mountain climb. Success is a treadmill.

Fine watches, I'd been told, were like rich people themselves: You could barely discern them working.

A girl doesn't need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot. Certainly I, at least, never have.

Everything became a metaphor, a talisman, a sign that I was still actually connected to people - that I wasn't so completely on my own.