My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious- on Saturday nights, when there dances I didn’t go to, and during visitation... I spent those times hiding. Most of the other girls propped open their doors for visitation, but we kept ours shut.
But sometimes speaking is so hard! It’s like standing still, then sprinting.
Some people who run for office want to create change, and some want everyone to fall in love with them.
The margin between staying and leaving was so thin; really, it could have gone either way.
Does being forty feel fabulous and foxy?” Liz asked.
Since Liz’s adolescence, when viewing television commercials that celebrated the ostensibly unconditional love of mothers for their children, or on spotting merchandise in stores that honored this unique bond with poems or effusive declarations – picture frames, magnets, oven mitts – she had felt like a foreign exchange student observing the customs of another country.
Liz had tried not to experience the doubly insulting sting of being excluded by a person she didn’t care for.
From then on, as long as I was at Ault, I would never be alone. Martha and I would get along, our friendship would last. I felt certainty and relief. Years later, I heard a minister at a wedding describe marriage as cutting sorrow in half and doubling joy, and what I thought of was not the guy I was seeing then, nor even of some perfect, imaginary husband I might meet later; I thought immediately of Martha.
She wasn’t wrong, which wasn’t the same as the idea being a wise one.
And the reason I’m telling you all this is that I want you to know no one in my life has ever made me feel worse about myself than you.
Did I used to think being pretty was my primary obligation because I was in some way delusional? Or was it that I’d absorbed the messages I was meant to absorb with the same diligence with which I studied? As the mother of a daughter, I hope she won’t judge herself as harshly as I judged myself, but her personality is so unlike mine – she is boisterous and outspoken – that I’m not inordinately concerned.
Does ROTC mean his family couldn’t afford tuition?
I contain multitudes.
I was me, Hillary, but I also was a vessel and a proxy.
I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea- I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I’d actually go.
Mr. Bennet stood, dropping his napkin on the table. “As interesting as I find this conversation, an urgent matter has come up. I need a hamburger.
But I always hoped a man would fall in love with me for my brain.
I won’t claim I’ve never in my life done anything I’m ashamed of, but I haven’t done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I’ve made, that’s fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.
Autocorrect can happen to anyone, but I seriously don’t understand what goes on between him and his phone.
And I want a woman in that seat. Whether it’s Alan Dixon or Joe Biden or George Bush, I’m so tired of these idiot men getting to make up the rules for the rest of us. They’re not smarter. They’re not nicer. They don’t have better judgment. They’re just men.