Not That Kind of Girl Quotes

“Somewhere in this period I moved, for the first time, into an apartment by myself. A junior one bedroom between Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Park Slope. To be able to live alone, in such a quiet, light-filled, tree-shaded trio of rooms, for $850 a month - I felt incredibly lucky. I woke up to birds. So many birds, in the spring, it was as if the tree outside my front windows held one hundred nine-year-old girls on a Skittles high.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“Our second Christian school was a real school, not a bunker for indoctrination.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“Until then, my teenage soul--suspicious of cheerfulness, though still reflexively respectful of authority--would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the official soul. The official soul, as transmitted through church and Christian paraphernalia, was upbeat, incurious, happy with its lot. It did not have any heroes other than the ones who appeared in the Bible, and it was content to hear the same stories about these people over and over again. It described pain and suffering in such a way that a person might think alcoholism or the loss of a child were no more inconvenient than a tussle with the flu: after it passed, you could stand in front of the congregation on Sunday and testify that it was all better, and God was good. As far as I could tell, that was the only story told by the official soul, and the real and true sadnesses had be excised for a more mellifluous account. Which made it seem as if there were things you couldn't talk about in church, or with people from church--what made you laugh, why you cried at a movie, what made you angry, or what books you read that hadn't been written by C.S. Lewis, A.W. Tozer, or D.L. Moody. Church was supposed to be the most important thing in life, but so much of life was left out, because so much of its trouble was assumed to be conquered. My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair--the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“I filled out my workbooks, read through the Bible, and learned hardly anything of academic worth during my year and a half at this first Christian school... What they really meant to teach us at this school was that the world was a poxed and pustuled old thing, diseased by our pride and greed, headed for destruction.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“...to be Catholic was to belong to an ethnic group, not a religion. You didn’t really have to believe it, or act like you believed it, to be a Catholic. You just had to show up every week for Mass and go to Catholic school.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir