Friends Are A Dime A Dozen Quotes

I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction--who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did--without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: "Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?" And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat!

Only a short time ago hed envied these brightly plumed birds[ladies in pastel dresses]. They possessed everything money could buy and most had the leisure to enjoy it. Yet their needs were greater than his own. They required a flock of admirers, dozens of servants, expensive clothes, and showy carriages to incite envy among their friends and foes.

March 12 Dear Stargirl, Hey, you're a big girl now. Stop being such a baby. You think you're the only one who's ever lost a boyfriend? Boyfriends are a dime a dozen. You want to talk loss, look at all the loss around you. How about the man in the red and yellow plaid scarf? He lost Grace. BELOVED WIFE. I'll bet they were married over 50 years. You barely had 50 days with Leo. And you have the gall to be sad in the same world as that man. Betty Lou. She's lost the confidence to leave her house. Look at you. Have you ever stopped to appreciate the simple ability to open your front door and step outside? And Alvina the floor sweeper-she hates herself, and it seems she's got plenty of company. All she's losing is her childhood, her future, a worldful of people who will never be her friends. How would you like to trade places with her? Oh yes, lets not forget the footshuffling guy at the stone piles. Moss-green pom-pom. What did he say to you? "Are you looking for me?" It seems like he hasn't lost much, has he? Only...HIMSELF! Now look at you, sniveling like a baby over some immature kid in Arizona who didn't know what a prize he had, who tried to remake you into somebody else, who turned his back to you and left you to the wolves, who hijacked your heart and didn't even ask you to the Ocotillo Ball. What don't you understand about the message? Hel-loooo? Anybody home in there? You have your whole life ahead of you, and all your doing is looking back. Grow up, girl. There are some things they don't teach you in homeschool. Your Birth Certificate Self, Susan Caraway

When Barthemo Beele was two years old, he was trained to use a little potty stool that was kept in a cupboard with a hanging cloth in front of it. This little secret, with its aura of shame, interested him so keenly that he had to lift the cloth and look at it a dozen times a day. To this single episode, he later felt, all of his curiosity could be traced. For little ‘Themo’ developed an unfortunate habit of lifting hanging cloths to peer under them. And after he had lifted the skirt of a visitor, a bishop’s wife, ‘Themo’ received his first sound whipping. Yet, as if his motto were Video, ergo sum, Barthemo went on lifting hanging cloths and looking under them, and was unable to resist doing so. He would lift the corner of a tablecloth and stare at the table’s legs, fascinated, flushed with guilt and a strange pleasure he could not name. He grew to a skinny, secretive kid, addicted to tattling, to forming, with friends, secret clubs, and to writing what he hoped were dirty words on fences: FUDGE, SHAME, ORGANISM, and especially LOVE. One day by chance he lifted a blanket and found a couple of organisms making love: his mother and a man not his father. Barthemo hastened to tell his father, who thanked him for his information by spanking him and locking him in his room for a day. When he decided the boy had learned his lesson, the elder Beele relented and let him out – but on condition that he mind his own business. Barthemo actually did have a business at this time, which was selling information to the police. For nickels, dimes and quarters, he would tell them which members of which secret clubs were stealing bike tyres from gas stations and magazines from drugstores. Later, for larger sums, he told them about car thefts and burglaries. This continued well into high school, when his duties as a school reporter took up most of his free time. The police gave him a present of money when he left for college, and told him he was the ‘Best little

This was the way we learned of the clan turned into slave labor by a farmer in Modesto, and the naive girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried and frozen, and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two children before killing himself in Cleveland, and the regretful refugees on Guam who petitioned to go back to our homeland, never to be heard from again, and the spoiled girl seduced by heroin who dissapeared into the Baltimore streets, and the politician's wife demoted to cleaning bedpans in a nursing home who one day snapped, attacked her husband with a kitchen knife, then was committed to a mental ward, and the quartet of teenagers who arrived without families and fell in together in Queens, robbing two liquor stores and killing a clerk before being imprisoned for twenty years to life, and the devout Buddhist who spanked his young son and was arrested for child abuse in Houston, and the proprieter who accepted food stamps for chopsticks and was fined for breaking the law in San Jose, and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed for domestic violence in Raleigh, and the men who had escaped but left wives behind in the chaos, and the women who had escaped but left husband behind, and the children who had escaped without parents and grandparents, and the families missing one, two, three, or more children, and the half dozen who went to sleep in a crowded, freezing room in Terre Haute with a charcol brazier for heat and never woke up, borne to permanent darkness on an invisible cloud of carbon monixide. Sifting through the dirt, we panned for gold, the story of the baby orphan adopted by a Kansas billionaire, or the mechanic who bought a lottery ticket in Arlington and became a multimillionaire, or the girl elected president of her high school class in Baton Rouge, or the boy accepted by Harvard from Fond du Lac, the soil of Camp Pendleton still in the tracks of his sneakers, or the movie star you loved so much, dear Aunt, who circled the world from airport to airport, no country letting her in after the fall of Saigon, none of her American movie star friends returning her desperate phone calls until with her last dime she snagged Tippi Hedren, who flew her to Hollywood. So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.