Natalie Standiford Quotes

This year I have Sister Mary Joseph for Religion. Right away I could tell she was going to become my archenemy. She has a stony face with a mean squint; Clint Eastwood in a wimple. She trained the squint on me and decided I was trouble from the get-go. ~ Natalie Standiford

You're a big sister?' I was shocked. She seemed so good-natured and compassionate. ~ Natalie Standiford

Its more a trance, jonah said. the whole world is pressing in on me, like a weight on my chest, slowly pushing me down ans down. and there's nothing between me and this weight but my flimsy skin. Its not enough. It won't protect me. It doesn't keep anything out. The outside will keep pressing until my ribs are crushed. ~ Natalie Standiford

How do you define a boyfriend? If a boyfriend is the first person you think about when you wake up in the morning and the last face you see before you fall asleep, then I was in love with Jonah. But if a boyfriend had to involve physical chemistry and kissing and sex and stuff, then, no, he wasn't that. ~ Natalie Standiford

Don, we're huge fans," I said.
"Don, we're huge fans," he shot back in a high-pitched voice meant to mock me.
What a jerk, I thought, but I didn't care, because he was Don Berman, and that's what Don Berman did. ~ Natalie Standiford

Before he sat down, my internal heat-seekers sensed what was coming my way: deep blue eyes that melted girls like Velveeta in a microwave. I tried to resist those microwave eyes, but sometimes there's no defense against them. I had a feeling I'd be seeing him weeping over my coffin later that night. ~ Natalie Standiford

Even Robot Girls get nervous sometimes.
-Beatrice Szabo ~ Natalie Standiford

He's stuck with them, so he makes the best of a bad situation. he's a hero because he makes something good out of a life he doesn't want. ~ Natalie Standiford

The students adore your father,' a perfumed woman said to me. 'Aren't you lucky to live with such a charming man!'
'He's even more charming at home,' Mom said. 'Isn't he, Bea? He rides a unicycle through the house -'
'- even up and down the stairs,' I added.
'He juggles eggs as he makes breakfast every morning -'
'- which he serves to us in bed of course,' I said.
'- and pulls fragrant bouquets out of his ass,' Mom finished.
'He's just a joy. ~ Natalie Standiford

Well, if you're talking about love, why did you bring up cocaine? ~ Natalie Standiford

I have a rotary phone from the sixties, it take forever to dial, which keeps me from making impulsive calls. ~ Natalie Standiford

No amount of wishing will bring back the dead. ~ Natalie Standiford

Those who love only half of him do not live him at all. ~ Natalie Standiford

Laura, this isn't love. Love lets you go on a trip without following you. Love can live without you for a week, knowing you'll come back.'
'No, it can't.' The afternoon shadows grew long and cold. In spite of the chill, a heat rose up inside her and flooded her face. 'That's how you know it's true love. When he can't live without you.'
Karen shook her head. 'That's how you know it's obsession. Or something else. ~ Natalie Standiford

I think ghostliness is a good quality. I pretend I'm dead all the time."
"What?" He stopped rummaging through his locker to look at me full in the face a last.
"It helps me go to sleep," I said.
"That shows you don't know anything about death," Jonah said.
"Do you?" I asked.
He hesitated before saying "I'm a g-g-g-ghost, aren't I?"
"I think being dead might be nice. Restful."
"Death is not restful. It's nothing."
"That's what seems restful to me," I said. "The nothing. Not being here. Not being anywhere. ~ Natalie Standiford

I didn't want to die. I just found death soothing to think about. ~ Natalie Standiford

I don't care, I don't care, I don't care what they think. ~ Natalie Standiford

He's as bad as my mother. Maybe worse. He's a market-research consultant. He studies people's facial expressions to see how they feel about commercials and products. He used to be a psychologist but he makes more money helping big corporations dupe the public. The worst part is he can look at your face and say 'Your upper lip just twitched! Anger! You're angry. Don't try to hide it from me, young man. Why does it make you angry when I say those pants make you look like a girl? Doe you have something against girls? Perhaps some unresolved Oedipal feelings? ~ Natalie Standiford

I'll never forget Jonah's face. A light poured out of him and became the spirit of the room, like a genie released from a bottle after centuries of darkness. ~ Natalie Standiford

Jonah's breath came fast and shallow. I reached for his hand. He turned his face to me, his eyes wide with panic. Two frozen ponds. A boy screamed and pounded on the surface, trapped under the ice. Panicking. Trying to break through. But his screams faded, his fists flailed, and he slipped away into the dark. The boy was gone. Nothing left but the ice, clear and smooth enough to skate on. ~ Natalie Standiford

Sounds pretty bad. Are you sure about this?"
"Oh, I'm sure."
"Well, I don't know what we can do to prepare, except say our prayers."
"Good luck with that, Herb. God died in 1945. ~ Natalie Standiford

Tom was okay, but we were just pretending to like each other, hoping that eventually, if we pretended hard enough, it would turn real. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't. But Jonah was already real. Even Matthew was real, though I'd never seen him. And they made me real. ~ Natalie Standiford

There is a separation between parents and children that shouldn't be breached when the children are young. The parents' adult follies are private. They're disturbing and hard to understand. But eventually the kids wise up, the follies start leaking out, and the parents are revealed in all their flawed humanity. Dad and I were about to cross that boundary for good. ~ Natalie Standiford

The whole summer stretched out before us, long, hot, endless.
September flashed like a tiny red warning light in the distance, but if I squinted, I could ignore it. I decided to squint for a while.
'It's going to be wonderful,' I said. ~ Natalie Standiford

I missed him desperately, even though he'd said he hated me, even though his anger - the rampage at his house, the X through his yearbook page, the cruel way he withdrew from everyone - scared me. I didn't care if he wasn't my boyfriend, or even my friend. He was my Jonah. I felt more alone without him now than I'd ever felt before I met him. My life had a hole in it. ~ Natalie Standiford

I might have been made of metal once, but not anymore. Like Pinocchio, I'd turned into a real girl. So far it sucked. But there was nothing I could do about it. ~ Natalie Standiford

A toast to the birthday boy!' Myrna shouted. 'Welcome to the adult world, hon. It's lonely, it's miserable, and God help you. But there are bright spots, and nights like tonight are one of them. ~ Natalie Standiford

Throughout history, big changes always start with a girl meeting a boy."
"No they don't," Jane said. "They start with somebody being assassinated. ~ Natalie Standiford

She decided that day to study Russian, the language of violence, terror, and absurdity. She knew she would never be bored. ~ Natalie Standiford

The whole world is pressing in on me, like a weight on my chest, slowly pushing me down and down. And there's nothing between me and this weight but my flimsy skin. It's not enough. It won't protect me. It doesn't keep anything out. The outside will keep pressing in until my ribs are crushed, and then my organs, my heart and liver and stomach ... ~ Natalie Standiford

I just wanted to say something about him, to shoot his spirit out over the airwaves and see what it will do. Maybe he'll come to one of you and give you something you need. Help you get rid of the blues, or keep the sun from catching you crying. A lot of you believe in ghosts. I've heard you say so. ~ Natalie Standiford

I think the most enduring lesson I was taught through my experiences of being a Girl Scout was that I was a member of a larger community. I out-grew my uniforms and badges years ago, but the memories of visiting nursing homes or organizing Earth Day tree plantings or my summers camping with girls from all different backgrounds will stay with me always. ~ Natalie Merchant

I started saying, 'I don't want to be crazy anymore.' I need to make some changes. And the first thing I started doing was just got all the men out of my life, because that was a big problem for me. That was a crutch, if you will. You know, trying to define yourself through other people or men, in particular. ~ Natalie Cole

There are a million reasons why I love you. A million reasons that all begin with the amazing woman you are and end with the type of man you make me want to be. ~ Natalie Ward

We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing. ~ Natalie Goldberg

I know I'm lucky to have a place in the world so special I never want to leave it. But that doesn't make the letting go any easier. ~ Natalie Lloyd

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters. ~ Natalie Goldberg

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say - snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola - something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present.

Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.

I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away. ~ Natalie Goldberg

This is what metaphor is. It is not saying that an ant is an elephant. Perhaps; both are alive. No. Metaphor is saying the ant is an elephant. Now, logically speaking, I know there is a difference. If you put elephants and ants before me, I believe that every time I will correctly identify the elephant and the ant. So metaphor must come from a very different place than that of the logical, intelligent mind. It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant. ~ Natalie Goldberg

I believe that a family's still a family not matter if you have two people or ten, no matter if you're raised by a mama or a grandpa. A family can look a hundred different ways, I knew that. ~ Natalie Lloyd

Do you know," he whispered very slowly, never taking his eyes from hers, "just how badly I want to make love to you? Not to your body, Natalie, but to you? ~ Adele Ashworth

Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments, ~ Elizabeth Kostova

It's quite a job, so to speak, when you can really be with your child for 21 out of 24 hours. ~ Natalie MacMaster

Being bilingual is like having a wife and a mistress. One can never be sure of either. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney

I think it just came to a point where I made a decision to do better with my life and health. And that is only by God's grace because there are no guarantees. ~ Natalie Cole

Nothing was expected of me except to dance. So dance I did. ~ Natalie Cuddington

We have to stop rewarding bad behavior. ~ Natalie Cole

I watched those women get eaten alive. And as a result of my witnessing that at a super fucking vulnerable moment for me, I internalized the message that a trans lesbian is just not an okay thing to be if you wanna be tolerated or respected by anybody other than a handful of communists. So I began my transition with essentially no role model of a widely respected and admired trans lesbian. And it doesn't help that most forms of transphobia are harsher on gay trans women than they are on straight trans women. Like take this trope that trans women are men who transition to creep on women in bathrooms. In response to that, it feels really good to be able to say, I'm not even attracted to women. I'm just a petite heterosexual biogirl. I'm surely not some kind of six foot monster who likes women. Ugh, shame! Shame! It does make me feel like a monster sometimes, like a mutant that has no place in society. And this shame has actually made it more difficult for me to accept that I'm a gay woman, than it was for me to come out as trans in the first place. It's like I made a kind of subconscious bargain where I traded my sexual orientation for my gender identity. So I finally transitioned only to spend the next couple years living with a different kind of denial. And that denial got pretty deep and pretty dark.

This is painful and incriminating to admit, but not all of my shame came from external bigotry. Some of it came from my own judgment and disgust toward things I saw ~ Natalie Wynn

I didn't know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be. ~ Natalie Wood

To be married is to be neither alone nor together. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney

Failure is a hard word for people to take. Use the word kindness then instead. Let yourself be kind. And this kindness comes from an understanding of what it is to be a human being. Have compassion for yourself when you write. There is no failure - just a big field to wander in. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Shaving half my head was a look that meant I could go punkier with my style. ~ Natalie Dormer

I got a feeling this whole thing is going to come apart like wet bread. ~ Natalie Babbitt

The only time I can't sleep is on a plane, when I am literally keeping it in the air with my brain. ~ Natalie Massenet

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind ... The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Bizarre though it is, people seem more inclined to rally around and identify with the victimizer than with the person who has suffered an attack. Eager to distance themselves from the victim position, influenced unconsciously, I suspect, by the pervasive taste for violence that infects our national life, people all too often direct their interest and even their sympathy to the perpetrator of a violent crime rather than to the victim. ~ Natalie Shainess

Anna Wintour has guided me. ~ Natalie Massenet

I think the opportunities are all over the place - around your corner or in more exotic locales. But everyone finding their own interest - sometimes it's hard to know what you're interested in, I think. ~ Natalie Portman

I learned what looked good on my petite frame, and to this day, I'm a great bargain shopper. ~ Natalie Morales

By 9:30 at night, I go to bed. ~ Natalie Du Toit

Struggling for my life, I gagged. The creature's strength unbelievable. There was nothing I could do. Its face was very close and it opened its mouth. Turning my head the opposite direction, I could feel the heat of breath on my ear. I struggled as hard as I could. It wasn't enough. Its teeth were bearing down on my neck: drool dripped soaking my collar. ~ Natalie Star

I didn't freak out. I immediately reached around my back, pulling the gun out of my waistband leveling it at the man's face. Well, maybe that was me freaking out. Who knows? ~ Natalie Carlisle

Astronomers are pure of heart and appealingly puerile. They look into the midnight sky and ask big questions, just as we did when we were in college: Who are we? Where do we come from? And why are we standing around outside on the night before finals, do we want to end up making elevator parts for a living like our father or what? ~ Natalie Angier

Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic? ~ Natalie Angier

From ages 10 to 12 or so, I barely remember anything. ~ Natalie Wood

I'm a serial monogamist and would never dream of being as predatory as some of the women I've played. I can actually be a bit shy. ~ Natalie Dormer

Nothing is ever lost, nor broken in vain.
It is the tapestry of life, a picture that has been framed. ~ Natalie Ducey

I'm supporting the School for Creative Startups because the project's ambition - to boost innovation and the culture of entrepreneurship - is something I feel strongly about. ~ Natalie Massenet

Yes, all sex is good, but not all sex is created equally. I'm not just talking about hotel sex. Because I've just learned that sex with Natalie is in a class of its own. It's beyond hotel sex. It's more than the bee's knees. It's better than the cat's meow. It's heart-stoppingly magnificent. And I'm not the kind of guy who uses that word. But sex with her is indeed magnificent. ~ Lauren Blakely

In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone. ~ Natalie Goldberg

If I had succumbed to peer pressure I would still be trolloping about society as a male and probably have just offed myself by now. ~ Natalie De Clare