Laurie Notaro > Quotes

“Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.”
― Laurie Notaro, I Love Everybody

“I want a man as nice as my retarded dog, but one that doesn't crap on the floor.”
― Laurie Notaro, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life

“It's okay," my husband said, shuffling toward his study. "I bought an electric-powered chain saw with a plug-in cord so if I run away fast enough, you can only chase me so far.”
― Laurie Notaro, I Love Everybody

“Hadn't one of my all-time favorite reveries been to become a cranky hermit, live unperturbed in my house, and have things brought to me like a monarch or tribal lord?”
― Laurie Notaro

“I need to learn to recognize and identify these danger signs when I see them, and not brush them off as "eccentricities," "lovable oddities," or "a sign that he s crying out for help and the comforting of a codependent nurturer that only I, Princess Enabler, can provide. Bad boyfriends don't disguise themselves; their girlfriends do it for them. ”
― Laurie Notaro, Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood

“...Everyone knows there's only one thing less welcome on a stage than a mime, and that's a clown, because everyone knows that clowns eat people.”
― Laurie Notaro, There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble

“Whaddaya mean 'old maids,' ha? The term is 'unclaimed treasure,' buddy, 'unclaimed treasure!”
― Laurie Notaro, Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood

“Goddamnit I've never been the "pretty friend..." She's the one who wears the perfect eyeliner, it never gathers like a crowd in her tear ducts to create a grapefruit-size ebony eye booger. The one who can wear a bodysuit, sit down in it, and not have rolls of fat cascading over her belt. The one who can eat a sandwich or hamburger and not wind up with lipstick on the bun or on her chin. The one who can actually eat in front of other people and not have food, like coleslaw, hanging from her lip or shooting out of her mouth, landing on the plates of other diners. She never spits when she talks. She sleeps with her mouth shut and never drools. She doesn't pick at her face. And she never, ever has to take a shit.”
― Laurie Notaro, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life

“Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent.”
― Laurie Notaro, There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble

“There is a (slight) chance that I might be going to hell.”
― Laurie Notaro

“Have you ever held a gun before?" the lady whom I was meeting with asked me.
No, n,: I siad with a little nervous laugh, feeling a little underqualified for the job. "My family were staunch believers in physical violence, not automatic violence, and we had a Safeway around the corner, so we never really needed to kill anything.”
― Laurie Notaro, I Love Everybody

“There are things running around out there with uteruses,son. You're going to need this.”
― Laurie Notaro

“Oh boy. Too drunk to hold on to a whiskey and Coke and the word "pretty." That's not a combination with a positive outcome. Not good at all. That's the secret password that usually leaves me trying to find a ride home in the morning.”
― Laurie Notaro, Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood

“Dr. Bone Specialist came in, made me stand up and hobble across the room, checked my reflexes, and then made me lie down on the table. He bent my right knee this way and that, up and down, all the way out to the side and in. Then he did the same with my left leg. He ordered X rays then started to leave the room. I panicked. I MUST GET DRUGS.

"What can I take for the pain?" I asked him before he got out the door.

"You can take some over the counter ibuprofen," he suggested. "But I wouldn't take more than nine a day."

I choked. Nine a day? I'd been popping forty. Nine a day? Like hell. I couldn't even go to the bathroom on my own, I hadn't slept in three weeks, and my normally sunny cheery disposition had turned into that of a very rabid dog. If I didn't get good drugs and get them now, it was straight to Shooter's World and then Walgreens pharmacy for me.

"I don't think you understand," I explained. "I can't go to work. I have spent the last four days with my mother who is addicted to QVC, watching jewelry shows, doll shows and make-up shows. I almost ordered a beef-jerky maker! Give me something, or I'm going to use your calf muscles to make the first batch!"

Without further ado, he hastily scribbled out a prescription for some codeine and was gone. I was happy.

My mother, however, had lost the ability to speak.”
― Laurie Notaro, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life

“So I graduated from college with a degree in journalism and was ready to find my dream job at a newspaper in addition to one good man who owned his own car and was certain about his sexuality, my two new, revised qualifying criteria for a potential date.”
― Laurie Notaro, Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood

“I have more faith in my bra than I have in my accountant.”
― Laurie Notaro, It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy

“I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want?”
― Laurie Notaro, It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy

“if another person got on that elevator to travel eight feet upward, I couldn’t have been responsible for what I did. I had been pushed to the limit. The next time it happens, I swore to myself, I’m going to reach out and pinch that One Floorer and say, “You get out there and walk! You won’t come close to burning a fraction of the three thousand calories you ate at lunch, but maybe by the time you reach the landing, you’ll pass out from exhaustion and get to go home for the rest of the day, you lazy little asshole, because that’s exactly what you want anyway!”
― Laurie Notaro, I Love Everybody

“knock, knock.
who's there?
it's cancer.
cancer who?
cancer of the section right behind your belly button that you have been trying to pass off as the pinch of ovulation. but it's not. it's cancer. it's me.”
― Laurie Notaro, I Love Everybody

“I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and serves as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I'd rather forget.”
― Laurie Notaro, Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood

“You are basically a flophouse and a pimp away from Pepcid rehab, you know that?" I informed Nana.”
― Laurie Notaro, Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood

“If Nana thinks you're trying to scam her, she'll tell you, and if she thinks you ruined her life by discontinuing Arnold's Thin bread, she'll let you know that, too. I guess when you spend eighty-seven years swallowing other people's bullshit, there comes a time when you gotta spit some back.”
― Laurie Notaro, An Idiot Girl's Christmas: True Tales from the Top of the Naughty List

“It was 1976.
It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man's head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful experience.

I remember thinking to myself, You're damn right it had better be magic, because that's what it's going to take to get me to wear something like that, Tinkerbell! It looked like a saddle. Weighed as much as one, too. Some girls even cried.
I didn't.
I raised my hand.
"Mrs. Shimmer," I asked the cautiously, "so what kind of security napkins do boys wear when their flower pollinates? Does it have a belt, too?"
The room got quiet except for a bubbling round of giggles.
"You haven't been paying attention, have you?" Mrs. Shimmer accused sharply. "Boys have stamens, and stamens do not require sanitary napkins. They require self control, but you'll learn that soon enough."
I was certainly hoping my naughty bits (what Mrs. Shimmer explained to us was like the pistil of a flower) didn't get out of control, because I had no idea what to do if they did.”
― Laurie Notaro, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life

“Come on, give me a shimmy!" Ruby screeched from the couch as she ground out one cigarette and then lit another. "You're fighting a battle of good and evil with your dog pimp! Your only weapon is the shimmy! There is power in the shimmy! Make him fear your shimmy! Now, goddamnit, show me your war shimmy!”
― Laurie Notaro, There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble

“Okay, okay,' I said to my husband as he picked up a food dehydrator off the table and shot me a look. 'Maybe I did get carried away. Maybe the world won't end in a year, maybe it won't end until 2028, when the Aztec calendar stops.'

'The Bugles will be very old by then,' my husband said. 'They will have lost their snappy crunch.'

'They weren't to eat,' I said. 'They were to put on our fingers and poke the eyes out of looters.”
― Laurie Notaro, We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive

“As soon as Nicholas was born, my mother swore she'd rather see her daughters become Jehovah's Witnesses or pole dancers before she saw her first grandchild in daycare when my sister went back to work. I don't think it was originally the idea of daycare that didn't sit well with her but the fact that there, in a bassinet, was a fresh slate, a lump of clay that could be worked on and molded into the perfect child who had eluded her the first time around with her own daughters.”
― Laurie Notaro, We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive

“...Is it just another pore expanding? God, I already have pores the size of pudding cups, that's the last thing I need, another pore...to fill in with spackle.”
― Laurie Notaro, We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive

“I realized that you don't try on a pair of pants, fart in them, and then put them back on the shelf, and the same rough politeness applied here, too. Plain and simple, I bled on it, I bought it.”
― Laurie Notaro, It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy

“It was the gift that every girl dreams of, to be dead long enough for your parents to realize how meaningless their lives were without you, how they were suddenly and at once deeply sorrowed at all of the horrible injustices they caused you, how they had truly never appreciated your natural gifts of beauty and grace, being that their beautiful angel would have such a short time on earth and should have spent that time driving the restored 1965 convertible Mustang she had openly AND PUBLICLY desired. But nope, she spent her last, short, fleeting moments driving a 1980 Chevy Citation, every so clearly a GRANDMA car, with fake red-velvet upholstery, a hatchback, and an interior that smelled like spoiled milk and sometimes meat. Being temporarily run over by a car was the best present I had ever received, and I didn't even have to do anything dramatic to get it, like write a note or buy some rope.”
― Laurie Notaro, An Idiot Girl's Christmas: True Tales from the Top of the Naughty List

“Asininity was puddling all around me in quantities too vast to soak up. - It Looked Different on the Model”
― Laurie Notaro