Gina Barreca Quotes

If anger were mileage, I'd be a very frequent flyer, right up there in First Class.

How about "diamonds are a girl's best friends"? Nope. It should be switched around and pointed out, instead, that your best friends are diamonds.

I see birthdays as a reward for having shown up 365 in a row. It's like getting a badge for attendance.

Rambling speeches and bad writing litter our lives. If talk is cheap, it’s because the supply usually exceeds the demand.

...there is a celebrated aphorism insisting that the best way to live is to 'work like you don't need the money, dance like nobody is watching, and love like you've never been hurt.'...After years of hearing and reading these lines I have decided to tell the truth: the original version is wrong. There is a grave error in the wording of this adage. The correct version should go as follows: Love like you don't need the money, Work like nobody is watching, Dance like you've never been hurt. See? Doesn't that make more sense?

Men fake sleep the way women fake orgasms: to be left alone already.

As a writer, I roll around in words the way cats roll around in catnip.

To slur “feminism” into “humanism” is to usurp women’s voices once again, to make the singular feminine into the so-called universal masculine.

Taking a lot of selfies doesn’t mean you live an examined life.

Some argue the days of furthering or bettering oneself through a liberl arts education are gone, but that's true only if "furthering and bettering" means "making more money"...For many life reveals itself more intimately in literature than in ledgers.

Power is the ability to persuade stupid people to do intelligent things and intelligent people to do stupid things. This is why power is dangerous.

Speaking up is important. Yet to speak up without listening is like banging pots and pans together: Even if it gets you attention, it’s not going to get you respect.

Until we’re pushing up daisies, it might be good to remind ourselves daily that everything’s coming up roses — for me and for you.

Patriotism is about a desire for progress, not a yearning for repetition.

In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.

When you enter your next relationship, you become the person you split up with.

I will count my blessings when I am in the doldrums, count to ten when I am quarrelsome, and count on my friends when I need a laugh.

Writers read. Writers read promiscuously, aggressively and relentlessly.

Maturity understands that there’s darkness in the world but that there’s no need to dwell in it: we can lighten up and offer illumination to others.

More than anything else, I wanted not to be alone — yet all my actions guaranteed I’d be lonely. Like wearing a vest of explosives when you’re coming in for a hug, insatiable need is a form of sabotage.

Not only do women hold up half the sky; we do it while carrying a 500-pound purse.

From age sixteen to age twenty, a woman's body is a temple. From twenty-one to forty-five, it's an amusement park. From forty-five on, it's a terrarium.

Since little-girlhood, we're trained to find the Big Bad Wolf seductive.

But if you believe that your best years are behind you, you've guaranteed they are; I'm going to dance into that good night, with the oldies turned up loud.

Fate gives us relatives for one reason: so that we have to learn how to deal with people we'd otherwise never know.

My therapist has helped me learn to understand that if you don't unpack your own emotional baggage it's no longer baggage--it's deadweight.

Ever notice there are no clocks in stores? It's like casinos; they don't want you to know how much time you've spent dropping your quarters.

Never use the passive voice. Do not say, 'It will get done.' Say, 'I'll do it,' and then stick to a solid, unwavering deadline

We all enter this world crying. Laughter is something we have to learn

It’s only when you’re at the bottom of the ladder that you ascend.

Here’s to looking every new mother in the eye, not just smiling at the baby, and asking her “How are YOU?” Here’s to listening for her answer.

While many things have changed, some things haven’t changed enough.

A stark sense of isolation encloses anyone who looks outward for validation.

Make your own choices before anyone else makes them for you and way before the house lights are lowered.

This year’s vintage is best enjoyed this year. Let’s begin.

Ever look at a sink full of dishes and think, “Why don’t I just bury these in the backyard?

Of course, motivating yourself has little to do with energy — and everything to do with decisions. Choosing to do something, especially if it seems difficult, might be hard. You need to decide whether the task is worth the effort.

When I was in my early 30s and appeared on CNN, Oprah, 20/20 and Entertainment Tonight, my loved ones didn’t say, “Good job!” My loved ones said, “The camera adds more than 20 pounds.” One detail-oriented aunt said “Not for nothing, but don’t wear red. You look like an ad for Red Lobster.

Boys are rewarded for playing games where they line up by height and then run into walls. Perhaps I'm making that up--or perhaps you should do a Google search for "Guy Runs into Wall for Fun." Not only do women hold up half the sky; we do it while carrying a 500-pound purse. From age sixteen to age twenty, a woman's body is a temple. From twenty-one to forty-five, it's an amusement park. From forty-five on, it's a terrarium. Bring your sense of humor with you at all times. Bring your friends with a sense of humor. If their friends have a sense of humor, invite them, too

There are now skin products supposedly created with 24-karat gold extract. I guess if financial times got really tough, you could always pawn your own head.

Increasingly political, assertive, articulate, and outspoken as we age, many of us become, paradoxically, the girls we were once: wild, hearty, courageous, and playful.

I've been married for a long time and there are days when I still wonder, 'Excuse me, but who is this man?

Words can be as irrevocable as an action. They can cut as deeply as a surgeon’s scalpel.

If you ask a server for a seriously old wine in my neighborhood, they’ll look at you funny and then bring you a half-finished glass from somebody else’s table.

Maybe it’s because I was the youngest or maybe it’s because I was girl, but I’ve spent much of my life expecting to be chastised for asking stupid questions.

Here’s the nice thing about being over 60: You know enough to know you don’t know everything, however much you’ve learned.

Want to guess what comes up when I Google “Woman discovers”? It’s not “new galaxy.” It’s “a body in her trunk” or "the unthinkable in her attic.” According to my computer search, other big discoveries by women include “her co-worker is her birth mom,” “a Renaissance painting in her kitchen,” and “her new home was once a meth lab.” Hey, at least that one contains the word “lab.

Ask a woman if she’s ambitious and she’ll look at you as if you just asked whether she sticks pins in puppies for fun. Ask a woman if she’s competitive and she’ll look at you as if you suggested that she’s a hooker.

Given that the shared understanding of truth has been central to language, religion and society, when we ignore small lies, we inflict damage on the larger truth. This is not holiness we’re talking about, but wholeness and integrity.

When the Apocalypse comes, you'll find me pushing Marie Antoinette out of the way and saying, 'Let me eat cake! Forget them; I want the cake! Two helpings! I have some friends with me! Is there coffee with the cake, Marie? I'm just asking.

Like most women, I’ve spent far too much time shuffling around this mortal coil looking for non-horror-show toilets. Few of my male counterparts partake of this quest. Instead, with the cheerful insouciance of Labrador puppies, they regard the earth as their urinal.

I’m fine but, wow, thanks for asking! Very few people ask how Mom is doing; we usually get asked how baby is doing, and that’s that.” My simple “How are YOU?” was met with a complicated response when I asked my niece Anne what her life was like now that she had become a mom. This surprised me not at all.

The only detail I knew about my dad’s experience in World War II was that he liked when they served chicken-fried steak. I was probably 13 when he told that story, and with the unblinking sanctimony that only a teenager can wield, I remember saying, “Wasn’t that really unhealthy?” In a look that I can only describe as for-a-smart-kid-you’re-remarkably-stupid, my father replied, “We were in planes carrying bombs, and enemy planes were shooting at us. Fried food was not a problem.

We all enter this world crying. Laughter is something we have to learn.

After a certain age, you finally become the indisputable authority on the subject of yourself.

I'd say it's time for women to make a stand. And it's far, far easier to make a stand when you're wearing comfortable shoes.

We don't want to settle down anymore; we've been settled, like some western township, and now we want to kick up the dust and tear down the fences. Not only won't we settle down; we also won't settle for less than what we've always wanted: a good time and a fair fight.

I was raised a Roman Catholic, but it was the kind of domesticated Catholicism that focused mostly on the length of your skirt rather than, say, the depth of your penitential observance

Having an unresolved Bad Boyfriend issue is like carrying around credit card debt . . . which can still show up and wreck your rating.

A truly thoughtful lover would not attempt to arouse you with the subtlety of a chimp trying to dial a rotary phone.

Just because you've become tired of emotion, or outgrown it, doesn't mean it'll be simple to free yourself from it. It must be dismantled, not ignored.

Heaven makes you family, but a new generation of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors can make you friends.

Boys are rewarded for playing games where they line up by height and then run into walls. Perhaps I'm making that up--or perhaps you should do a Google search for "Guy Runs into Wall for Fun.

Comics know that time plus pain equals humor and that we can redeem even awful moments from the past by translating them into a shared experience.

Let your hair down. Let your clothes fall to the floor. Fall for a line. Fall in value. Fall on your back, fall on your knees, fall into the gutter. And look up. Sigh, heal, laugh,, understand. Then rise.

To get anywhere, a woman must fall. You can fall by being tipsy, getting ahead of yourself, by missing a step. You can fall because there was a blind alley, a sharp curve, a slippery surface, or a stumbling block. You fall because somebody pulls the rug out from under you or because the whole time as you stood, believing you were on solid ground, there was a trapdoor directly beneath you.

Culpa" may mean "fall," but implies responsibility. A culpable woman is a capable woman, and an admission of guilt is the price of admission into a life of free will.

Fallen women are often used as an object lesson, as the subject of a tutorial on how not to become her. This book is no such tutorial; it is a celebration. It encourages you to take risks. The risk of failure, rejection, humiliation—the risk of losing place for yourself entirely and not being able to get it back, of being seen as foolish, brazen bitchy, grabby, and batshit crazy. Embrace the fall.

Here's to every woman who lost her virginity but kept the box it came in.

Most funny women become funny because I have to.

Telling a funny story doesn't diminish the significance of the event, but instead changes the script. The fear of being laughed at becomes precisely what makes others laugh. You're the narrator and you have control over it. It becomes your story as opposed to something that happened.

All good writing reflects and illuminates life; Fast Funny Women holds up a compact mirror. In it you'll see yourself. With luck, you'll laugh.

Most funny women become funny because they have to.

But it nevertheless seems odd to reaffirm that women's humor exists, because if you look at any random group of women for more than thirteen seconds, you'll notice we're laughing.

When women are laughing, we're not telling jokes—we're telling stories. We're talking about what happened to us that day. Our lives are a riot.

Writing it down is the opposite of covering it up.

All good writing reflects and illuminates life; Fast Fallen Women holds up a compact mirror. You might well see yourself.

As soon as you feel your own desire, you fall. To feel deeply is to fall far. The fallen woman is controlling or out of control; she is out for herself or out of her mind; she is out for blood and out of bounds. A fallen woman is a dangerous woman because she has nothing left to lose.

Time doesn’t offer a refund. We don’t get to try on the future the way we try on a bathing suit and then decide we don’t like it once we see what it looks like in natural light.

Every year has an expiration date, as does every lifetime. Even the finest wine can’t age forever.

What doesn’t polite society, in all seriousness, want to discuss? Sex, money, political corruption, bodily functions, religion, loss and despair? These have been the very subjects attracting writers of comedy since Aristophanes penned “Lysistrata” as a vehicle for the young Joan Rivers.

Recognizing not only intellectually but psychologically and physically, through laughter, that we are not the only ones feeling such a range of emotions makes us feel less alone, provides a renewed sense of perspective, allows us to hit an emotional “reset” button and can relieve stress.

When someone genuinely laughs with you, it’s proof that you share a certain internal space. And that’s not so lonely after all.

Here’s the premise: you’re in a bunker in the post-apocalyptic world. (I’m assuming that, by the date of publication, this will still be a “premise.”) You’ve managed, almost magically, to bring with you the 10 movies, but only 10 movies, you’ll be able to watch for the rest of your days.

Civil conversations about personal perspective will be welcome in the bunker, if only because we’ll be cognizant of the fact that incivility didn’t work out too well, given the whole apocalypse thing.

Every potato chip I've have ever eaten has added another chip to my shoulder. They’re a lot heavier to carry around than the pounds, somehow.

The holidays make her feel as if she’s supposed to be in a cuddle, since everybody else suddenly seems paired off, like mittens, slippers or AA batteries.

Time doesn’t offer a refund.

We want to possess what they’re not making any more, what not many others can get and what will distinguish us from others.

Ever have a day when you wonder what, if anything, is worth doing? Forget about doing anything well: I’m talking about simply meeting basic standards.

November makes me anxious. This year’s holidays are approaching with a particularly lean and nervous look, like coyotes dressed as reindeer and ready for a tussle. Nothing feels right.

India’s latest latrine triumph will improve the lives of many of its citizens. Given what else has been going on in the rest of the world, any reports of currently “defecation-free” zones, literal or metaphorical, are welcome.

We all know that history is personal, so here is my brief “Autobiography by Bathroom.” I’ve titled it “To Pee or Not to Pee.” Not to get all Shakespearean or anything, but the process does involve shocks that flesh is heir to, the baring of bodkins, swearing, and what can feel like a sea of troubles.

There’s a price to be paid when you raise your daughter to be nice, and she’s not the only one who’s going to pay it. You’ll be right there beside her, trapped by inconvenience, inflexibility and double standards.

Our beliefs define us. And who wants to be undefined in today’s world? So we scrape together convenient truths and build our identities out of them.

There was something wrong; nobody else had to tell me. Writing it down made me see it. I’d told myself, as if writing to another person.

Those of us who have never been in the military don’t understand what it is like to serve in the military.