The Savage Girl Quotes

“Childhood and adulthood were not factors of age but states of mind.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Cats are there to be indulged. That's their function: to receive the love we never fully gave our parents. Not like dogs. Dogs are there to give us the love and devotion our children will never fully give us.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“You need contradictions to make an ideal.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“An ironic religion -- one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion -- a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps . . . the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffein and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hairgel and pimple cream and growth hormone-treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly, fleeting, violent sublimations. It's all part of the conspiracy . . . all of it trying to convince them that they're here to be trained for lives of adventure and glamor and heroism, when in fact they're here only to be trained for more of the same, for lives of plunking in the quarters, paying a premium for the never-ending series of shabby fantasies to come, the whole lifelong laser light show of glamorous degradation and habitual novelty and fun-loving murder and global isolation.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Beauty is the PR campaign of the soul.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“How easy it is for men to talk about beauty, and how subtly intimidating when they do.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“It's kind of a dark little life . . . being a paranoiac, but it's also not without its comforts.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“From the beauty they deserve will come the love they deserve. And from the love will follow truth.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Contradictions stop only the people who stop and think about them, who stop to question the consistency of their various desires instead of simply forging ahead and fulfilling them all.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Our world exists only to hold up this other world, this ideal world. It's the world of our dreams, our desires. It's elaborate, it's heavy, and we carry it around with us everywhere. But we don't mind. The more that's up here, the better. Because up here is where we keep all that's best in us. The more that's up here, the richer our imagination becomes. . . . Products are the materials we use to build our world above the world.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“What's the paradessence of ice cream?”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“She recalls the smell of bologna, the slimy, metallic taste of it on her tongue. Not for the first time she decides to become a vegetarian.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl