Sounds Like Titanic Quotes

“And because you have not yet developed feelings toward yourself (other than negative feelings about your body), you see yourself only as a reflection of what other people think of you”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“You had no idea that the Northeast was the place where rich important people determine what the rest of the country will read and listen to and think about.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“An understanding of classical music - something adults say they wish they knew more about but don't - gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“By high school, the anorexia epidemic spreads its tentacles into the bodies and/or minds of almost every girl you know. It creeps into town and stalks its victims; girls collapse on the gymnasium floor, on the running track, in the shower. They are scraped off floors and lawns and bathtubs, shipped off to the hospital, then to rehab.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“An acidic current of anti-intellectualism and prowar sentiment will corrode nuance, subtlety, and complexity into a dull, generalized fear.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Faking violin stardom ultimately allowed me to return to what captivated me at four years old when I first heard Vivaldi's "Winter." It wasn't the desire to be seen as talented, or a ticket to the big city, or worldly success, or respect. It wasn't The Money. It was simply this: I loved a song. Playing the role of a famous, world-class violinist allowed me to return to the feeling that playing the violin doesn't require anything more than loving a song. Or anything less.

As Mr. Rogers says at the end of the trumpet factory episode, right after he explains that as a kid he pretended he was a songwriter on TV, right before he begins to sing on TV:

'It helps to play about things. It helps you to know how it really feels.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“There is a unique wisdom of the small American community, the isolated rural hamlet, and it is this: Everyone matters. Not in some clichéd humanistic sense, but in a literal, practical sense.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Years later, the writer Malcolm Harris will articulate the ways in which people of your generation were taught to value work as an end in itself, rather than a process through which something tangible is gained.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“You are someone whose upbringing was upper class enough to make you believe you could make music for a living, but lower class enough to provide no knowledge of how to do it.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The impact on the audience is a sort of emotional hostage-taking: YOU WILL FEEL SOMETHING VERY POWERFUL RIGHT NOW, the eagle sings in the voice of a pennywhistle. YOU WILL SWELL WITH VAGUE BUT IMPORTANT-FEELING EMOTIONS FOR NO DIESCERNABLE REASON.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Sounds Like Titanic is a work of nonfiction. Names and potentially identifying features of individuals, as well as minor details of chronology, have been changed, and dialogue has been reconstructed.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“What are one’s options in America, land of the exceptional, if one is born average?”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Years later you’ll marvel at the small yet profound difference between adrenaline-fueled focus and adrenaline-fueled panic.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Life in the body means that no physical part of you—not even the lips that you have no choice but to bring with you into prealgebra class—is left unseen, unremarked upon, uncalculated for sexual potential”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“But you will not “feel free to call with any questions,” because you know that asking questions is the surest route in America to getting your ass fired.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Or perhaps I apologized because I hadn’t yet learned that I was capable of expressing anger. I didn’t know that if I was angry it need not be confined to the quiet pages of a private journal but could be screamed aloud (Harriet running toward the Space Needle). Not expressing anger was what made me “a very easy person to work with.” I hadn’t yet learned I could be so much more than that.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“It was a shockingly un-American idea: No matter how hard you work, you’ll never be as good as someone who was born great.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Enlightened liberal progressive secular humanists are free, to think or do or feel anything. Except for hate.)”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The club—really a poolside lounge at one of Dallas’s fanciest hotels—is full of blondes dripping with diamonds, their faces glowing with the flawless, glossy finish that can only be achieved by an hour-long sit-down with a professional makeup artist, their breasts sculpted into tanned teardrops by the best surgeons oil money can buy. One particularly stunning specimen—standing at least six feet tall, her perfectly proportioned legs, hips, and breasts accentuating the tailor cut of her red blazer and skirt suit—strides across the open courtyard in sling-back stilettos, puffing on a cigar with bee-stung red lips.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“My mind is a CD player with a broken Fast-Forward button, thoughts flying by faster than I can hear them, zooming past any restful pause.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“In America, an entire landscape can disappear in an instant.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Yevgeny retained one strikingly un-American trait: he was not made uncomfortable by the sadness of failure.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“You have never done this well in school. You have never made this much money. You have never received so many compliments on your appearance, for your body is shrinking into a landless skeletal border, and a landless skeletal border is your nation’s preferred female shape. You have never been so close to killing yourself, not with drugs, which are merely a symptom, but with overwork—your real disease. It’s a disease you were born with, fertilized with mountain fog—the desire to flee small-town Appalachia, the guilt of doing so, the suspicion that you are, at your core, a fraud. The only cure is to work more. Work harder than anyone else.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“But you had mistaken her success for happiness, which turns out not to be the same thing.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“You had no clue that the Northeast was—150 years after the transcendentalists—still the place to go if you were young and aspiring to one day become a contributor to American literature, music, or art (not to mention politics, science, and finance). Before you met Fernando, you had no idea that the Northeast was the place where rich important people determine what the rest of the country will read and listen to and think about. You were under the mistaken impression—common among rural teenagers outside of the Northeast—that American culture was like American land, underneath everyone’s feet, available for anyone to cultivate and harvest.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The Mozart Effect Effect thrives in a realm that is neither science nor art, a realm that is far more organically American: marketing. Megacorporations like “Baby Einstein” are born and flourish by promoting the disproven belief that blasting Mozart toward a baby—or even a fetus—can fast-track the kid to Harvard.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Snoop Doggy Doo-oww-ohhhoggg!” The sexual ministrations of inner-city lyricists become the lingua franca of your generation, fluently spoken by every thirteen-year-old kid regardless of race,”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“An understanding of classical music—something adults say they wish they knew more about but don’t—gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Best-selling how-to-save-Ophelia books aside, was it even possible for any parent of a daughter in the early 1990s to do much but watch from the boat as an entire generation of girls sank beneath the surface? After your trip to the gallery, you and your mom stop at a café for French onion soup. She tries to give you words of encouragement, words to help you navigate what she imagines to be the typically treacherous waters of middle school drama. You can’t bring yourself to tell her the real problem: You aren’t pretty enough. You will never be pretty enough. You can’t tell her because you are ashamed that you have a problem so clearly unfixable, a problem that can’t be solved by working harder.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic