Quotes from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“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”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“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.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“I am aware that somewhere along the line, I've subconsciously turned down the pitch of my speech, like a silencer of a gun that softens the sound of its firing. Now, even when I yell, I don't feel like I am using my full voice.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“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.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“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”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“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.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“It's meant I will act like less of an asshole, but feel much more like one.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“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?”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“i feel like the squirrels that so often run in front of our car
& then stand paralyzed in the forward crunch of the tires
i’m torn between the compulsion to run
& the urge to stand still & hope the danger will pass”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“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.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“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.”
― Koren Zailckas, quote from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

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Popular quotes

“Romans 2:7–8: “To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger.”
― Gary L. Thomas, quote from Sacred Marriage: Celebrating Marriage as a Spiritual Discipline

“La muerte, que un par de veces me tomó y me soltó, a menudo me llama todavía y yo la mando a la puta madre que la parió.”
― Eduardo Galeano, quote from Days and Nights of Love and War

“[There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as extra-sensory perception or the claim that the stars influence man’s destiny. In regard to all such claims, the agnostic is the type who says, “I can’t prove these claims are true, but you can’t prove they are false, so the only proper conclusion is: I don’t know; no one knows; no one can know one way or the other.”

The agnostic viewpoint poses as fair, impartial, and balanced. See how many fallacies you can find in it. Here are a few obvious ones: First, the agnostic allows the arbitrary into the realm of human cognition. He treats arbitrary claims as ideas proper to consider, discuss, evaluate—and then he regretfully says, “I don’t know,” instead of dismissing the arbitrary out of hand. Second, the onus-of-proof issue: the agnostic demands proof of a negative in a context where there is no evidence for the positive. “It’s up to you,” he says, “to prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt.” Third, the agnostic says, “Maybe these things will one day be proved.” In other words, he asserts possibilities or hypotheses with no jot of evidential basis.

The agnostic miscalculates. He thinks he is avoiding any position that will antagonize anybody. In fact, he is taking a position which is much more irrational than that of a man who takes a definite but mistaken stand on a given issue, because the agnostic treats arbitrary claims as meriting cognitive consideration and epistemological respect. He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer. The agnostic thinks that he is not taking any stand at all and therefore that he is safe, secure, invulnerable to attack. The fact is that his view is one of the falsest—and most cowardly—stands there can be.”
― Leonard Peikoff, quote from Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“What were you going to do tonight?"
"I was going to listen to the songs of Rachmaninoff."
"Who's that?"
"A dead Russian.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from South of No North

“Ask, and it shall be given you, seek, and ye shall find, knock, and it shall be opened unto you. (Mat. 7:7).”
― quote from The Game Of Life How To Play It

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