Kathy Griffin · 348 pages
Rating: (34.3K votes)
“My fear of camping: I’m convinced bugs will crawl up my vagina and lay eggs. Isn’t everyone?”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“It always pisses me off when I’m calling in to some Morning Zoo radio show to promote God-only-knows what—probably this book, so get ready, I’m comin’—when the DJ actually tries to convince me that there are as many female comics as male ones. Cue hypermasculine Morning Zoo Hacky McGee voice: “So Kath, I don’t know what you chicks are always complaining about.” To which I respond: “Really? Why don’t you call your local comedy club and ask for the Saturday night lineup? I guarantee you the male to female ratio is going to be about nine to one. You dick-wad.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“At St. Bernardine’s the nuns never liked me. Especially Sister Mary Bitch-and-a-Half. I think that was her biblical name.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“To this day, the behavior of straight men is something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. Have you ever met one? They’re really weird. Sometimes they want to have sex without A Chorus Line playing in the background. Yuck. How is that even possible?”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“Most people new to a city on the ocean would probably go to the beach during the day when there are people around. I, on the other hand, decided to try a midnight swim at the somewhat gamy Santa Monica pier, by myself. That is, until a nearby guard kicked me off the beach for my own safety.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“When my pals in high school were starting to drink, it always looked unappealing to me. I would be at a big party and see one of the popular girls or football players completely wasted and puking and acting a fool, and think to myself, There’s nothing cool about that. I never wanted to be that out of control.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“I was a soccer cheerleader. It doesn’t get nerdier than that. I was fired from the soccer cheerleading squad after one year, which I believe to this day is unprecedented. You have to understand, no one went to the soccer games. In fact, I believe part of my duties as a cheerleader was to bake brownies for the team.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“This one guy Roland was so weird that during sex his voice altered—as if he were a fucking alien—and he started talking like a baby in a bizarre high-pitched voice. He’d start screaming shit like, “I just want to fuck my baby! I’m your baby! Will you be my baby? Baby? Baby?” For one thing, he couldn’t decide whether he was the baby or the daddy. Make up your mind, freak. I had to force myself out from under him and flee the apartment undressed, clutching my clothes.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“I honestly never once heard them fight. They yelled at us kids all the time, but never at each other. My siblings and I joke to this day about how the reason we have trouble in relationships is because we never learned how to fight from our parents.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“One of my recurring D-list moments is when people stop me in the airport and tell me they loved me on SNL. I never know if they think I’m Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, or Chris Kattan. I just say “Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed me as Mango.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“My mother’s father was just called “The Governor,” or “Himself.” Which, if you have sixteen kids, probably isn’t as crazy as it sounds.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“Presentation was the name of the Catholic church [my mother's family] attended, and this is what I love about the Irish: My mother became known as the second prettiest girl at Presentation parish. “Why was that okay?” I once asked her. “Oh, because everybody knew Mary Griffin was the most beautiful girl at Presentation,” she replied. My mom was happy to be on the D-list! Just like I’m not trying to be Brooke Shields, she wasn’t trying to be Mary Griffin.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“I was only a few years away from becoming an overnight success.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“We all make our own deals. [...] No one knows what happens in a relationship except the two people who are in it.”
― Kathy Griffin, quote from Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
“the most developed country in the world made such a mess of its own presidential election that it took several weeks for the Supreme Court to decide 5–4 that the candidate with the most votes had lost.”
― Jonas Jonasson, quote from The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden
“When women respond negatively to misogynistic or rape humor, they are "sensitive" and branded as "feminist," a word that has, as of late, become a catchall term for "woman who does not tolerate bullshit.”
― Roxane Gay, quote from Bad Feminist
“We've spoken of the Knights of the Holy Grail, Percival. Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail.
In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil.
You should be interested! Such a quest serves God's cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God?
Or suppose the Lowell Professor of Religion at Harvard should actually find the Holy Grail, dig it up in an Israeli wadi, properly authenticate it, carbon date it, and present it to the Metropolitan Museum. Millions of visitors! I would be as curious as the next person and would stand in line for hours to see it. But what different would it make in the end? People would be interested for a while, yes. This is an age of interest.
But suppose you could show me one "sin," one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake.
Show me a single "sin."
One hundred and twenty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Where was the evil of that? Was Harry Truman evil? As for the pilot and bombardier, they were by all accounts wonderful fellows, good fathers and family men.
"Evil" is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone's either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.
God may be absent, but what if one should find the devil? Do you think I wouldn't be pleased to meet the devil? Ha, ha, I'd shake his hand like a long-lost friend.
The mark of the age is that terrible things happen but there is no "evil" involved. People are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the "evil" come in?
There I was forty-five years old and I didn't know whether there was "evil" in the world.”
― Walker Percy, quote from Lancelot
“One day I was particularly gloomy, and Jim asked me what the matter was. I told him my high school girlfriend (for all of two weeks) had broken up with me. He said, “Oh, that’ll happen a lot.” The knowledge that this horrid grief was simply a part of life’s routine cheered me up almost instantly.”
― Steve Martin, quote from Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
“On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.