{"author":"Koren Zailckas","author_id":"Koren+Zailckas","total_quotes":15,"quotes":[{"text":"I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, 'Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol.' To which I always respond, 'I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["alcoholism","irony"],"id":15978,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance.","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["black-and-white","excess","excessiveness","extreme","extremes","hoard","lack-of-moderation","moderation","passionate-life","too-little","too-much","too-much-of-a-good-thing","worth"],"id":22165,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of 'mind expansion' or 'warm healing energy.' I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["buddhism","hippie","hippies","metaphysics","new-age","yoga"],"id":99467,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"I do think anger is so difficult for women. Girls think it undermines their femininity it's not very ladylike. ","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["women","think","difficult "],"id":169062,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"We are taught to believe it's bad to be angry, or at least it's not good. That's not the case all throughout the world. People are more open and not embarrassed about it. For instance in Paris, people believe Americans have a really unhealthy relation with anger. They think it's essential to get angry.","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["good","believe","world "],"id":210224,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["alcohol","college"],"id":222124,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"That's the thing about social drinking: In the end, it's the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you're there, really there inside that moment, with its neighbourly warmth and conversation, it's hard to tell what's responsible for producing emotion. What's responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who's running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you're drunk, or because you're connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced?","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["memoir"],"id":232378,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"I think what I learned in research is that as Americans, we're very distrustful of anger. We're not sure if we should repress it. The idea that anger is supposed to be controlled is American, and we try to keep it out of our homes.","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["american","research","think "],"id":237883,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["boyfriends","ex-boyfriends","love","relationships","stoicism"],"id":242639,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"},{"text":"I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.","author":"Koren Zailckas","tags":["emotion","emotions","families","family","family-therapy","memoir","writing-craft","writing-from-the-heart","writing-life","writing-process","writing-style"],"id":350550,"author_id":"Koren+Zailckas"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":15,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}