Flat Broke with Two Goats Quotes

“When you have gone through a sort of travesty of your own making, failure begins to feel like part of you. You get used to it. People around you expect you to fail, and you learn to expect it from yourself, to see it as almost comforting in its familiarity. You begin to believe you are destined to make a mess of things. But then there are those unexpected kindnesses, those moments when someone does something to make you believe that perhaps you are more than the sum of everything you have done wrong, that perhaps you are worth more than you think.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“When I was growing up, my parents had created for my brother and me the perfect upper middle-class lifestyle. We had everything we needed, and most things we wanted. We took piano lessons. We went to summer camp. We swam at the local country club. We had college funds. And while what I should have learned from living a relatively privileged childhood was the value of hard work and frugality, what I learned instead was that money was not something with which I needed to be overly concerned. If and when I needed it, it would magically appear. Like a genie.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“the simplest of joys, the pleasure of nurturing living things that would then give back to me in return.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“My grandmother had been married to my grandfather for almost seventy years. Their relationship had been so close, their roots so deeply intertwined, that I rarely thought of them as individuals. Together, they had been one powerful spiritual force, a two-tiered anchor, a double-sided talisman. Now, for the first time, I wondered if my grandmother had ever longed for another life, if she had had any regrets, if on that last morning, while I was cooking oatmeal and spooning Folgers into her mug, she was dreaming of all the places she had been and the people she had loved, or if, in the end, she had simply taken one giant leap and become a part of it all.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“When the trunk of a bristlecone begins to decay, the tree, in an amazing feat of self-preservation, stretches its branches to the ground, forming a new trunk. It recreates itself. It is reborn.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“But feeling better would not mean the loss was less real, only less raw and exposed. Instead of being on my skin, my grief would seep through my pores and adhere to my heart and lungs, to my blood and guts. And now I had to figure out how to live like that, how to behave like a normal, sane person, a person who was not haunted.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“If I had taken care of our children like you took care of our finances, they would all be dead by now.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“Cognitive dissonance, psychologists call it, this ability to hold two contradictory ideas or beliefs at one time.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“Maybe things would stop happening to me, and I could start making things happen.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“past the time when we were we, and into my own, separate life.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself. That’s how I hold your voice. —RUMI”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“I did not yet know that I deserved better. I only knew that she did, and I had to get us out of there.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“And gradually, very gradually, I would begin to see that this was not so much an ending as a beginning, that my life was not so much a line as one intricate loop, winding back, back, back through time and then spiraling rapidly forward, the past, the present, and the future, the person I was and the person I had yet to become, all tangled into one.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“You’ll never get away,” he said calmly. “There’s a place where I can bury you, and no one will ever find you.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“I realized that if someone told me right then that I could go back 10 years, have my old life back exactly as it was, a life where I never saw my husband, where our lives were always about becoming instead of being, I would have refused. It was such a simple realization, yet it seemed momentous. Being poor means not having a lot of options other people have; should I pay at the pump for gas or pay cash in the store, should I drive or fly to my destination, should I get new brake pads like the mechanic recommends or just hope the hold out a while longer. Now, if a hypothetical possibly embolden me, given the alternative of that life or this one, I would choose this one. And then for once, instead of trying to fill in the rest of that thought, but I really wish we had, I tried to leave it just as it was. I choose this.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“Merle strutted around his section of the pasture, peeing on his beard and into his mouth, curling his lips, and making loud, gurgling sounds.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“Bucks stink, they said. They can be aggressive. They do disgusting things like pee in their mouths. They will try to mount anything that moves or doesn’t move. We also knew that bucks needed to be kept separately from does because having a buck in rut near a doe in milk causes the doe to produce hormones that could potentially taint the doe’s milk, make it taste, well, goaty.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“Now, I often make a big batch of soup on Saturday or Sunday, and we eat that for days. Fortunately, neither of us minds having taco soup for three or four nights in a row!”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“It’s not dead! Have you not ever heard of ‘playing possum’?”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“When you have gone through a sort of travesty of your own making, failure begins to feel like part of you. You get used to it.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“Plus, it seemed odd to begin our foray into local food by buying chickens from halfway across the country.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“You drive,” he said. “I’ll ride in the back with the possum.” It was a line we would use from that night on. “You drive; I’ll ride in the back with the possum,” one of us would say, and the other one would spurt a mouthful of coffee or beer across the room. It was funny, yet it also seemed to encapsulate our situation in some essential way, to reduce it to its necessary parts. How crazy was this life we led, how weird and wacky and totally unexpected?”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats

“But how could I tell my parents this?”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats