Rabbits for Food Quotes

“To not want to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“People who are not easy to like, they have feelings just like nice people do.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“And worse than the hurt of not being someone special is the shame of it, the shame of how much I want that, to be someone special.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“When our surroundings are overwhelmingly depressing, how can we be anything but depressed?”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“People who are clinically depressed have their own disturbances with food. For some, it’s as if hand to mouth were an involuntary reflex, as if food could fill the abyss. Which it can’t, and they grow fat, which does nothing good for their state of mind. The others are rarely hungry or else they are never hungry. They emaciate, become insubstantial, a manifestation of the wish to disappear. Bunny is one of the thin ones.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“Fun not shared is not fun. You can derive great pleasure alone, enjoy yourself enormously, experience bliss, but fun requires someone else, like a friend or a dog.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“A friend from work should be a compartmentalized and exclusive friendship; that is, my friend from work, as opposed to our friend from my work. Everyone should be free to go to lunch or dinner with a good friend from work without your significant other sitting there at the table letting go with bull-snort exhales of boredom laced with rising irritation while you and your friend are having what amounts to a private conversation about office intrigue.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“When I met Stella, I became a full person. To be complete is to see the world with two good eyes. Twin eyes. I don’t know how else to explain it. There was nothing that I could not tell her because it was as if she already knew. It was like sharing myself with myself, the only difference being that Stella didn’t pass judgment on me, nor I on her. Instead, all things that had been shameful, painful, hurtful and humiliating whipped seamlessly into hilarity.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“Jean Rhys”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“Anathem?”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“Pain, fixed with laser beam focus on itself, is self-centered, allowing for thoughts only of alleviation. Even the pain of something as common and comprehensible as a toothache, one of those cavities sufficiently deep to expose the nerve endings, a cavity that feels like someone has jammed an ice pick through your eye, shrinks your world into an impenetrable bubble of agony. It hurts, and it hurts, and that, the hurt, is everything. You can’t think about anything except wanting the hurt to go away.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“Jeffrey gets up and does that cat thing, the walking in tight circles, counter-clockwise, a ritualistic three times around, as if taking part in a druid divorce, before he settles down and curls into a ball.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“Last year, last New Year’s Eve, she’d said to him, “You know, I’d really rather stay at home and drink Clorox.” But that was last year. This year, she would say no such thing. This year, to indulge in the kick of a joke or the pleasure of hyperbole is to risk being taken at her word.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“The transformation from rancid to clean, particularly after a stretch of feculence, is like being born again, minus Jesus. Praise is not for the Lord, but for the Hydroluxe showerhead.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“What Albie knows, but will not say, is that, excepting when we are asleep, the lachrymal glands never cease secreting protein-rich and antibacterial fluid, tears, which keep the eyeball lubricated. In other words, with sleep and death as the only respites, we cry forever.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“It is all too apparent: wounds never heal, but rather, in a torpid state deep inside the medial temporal lobe of the brain, grief waits for fresh release.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“Bunny does not want to kill herself. She does not want to die. It’s that she no longer wants to live. To not want to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food

“It is counterintuitive to inflict pain, tangible pain, as a way of relieving pain, but pain you can point to, pain that has a place, is pain that can be relieved.”
― Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food