Tara Quotes

You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.

I'll think of it tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.

My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.

It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.

We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell

I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

If I looked like him,” Tara said. “I’d want to have sex with myself. All the time.

It's a weird smile, but it reaches his eyes and I bottle it. And I put it in my ammo pack that's kept right next to my soul and Justine's spirit and Siobhan's hope and Tara's passions. Because if I'm going to wake up one morning and not be able to get out of bed, I'm going to need everything I've got to fight this disease that could be sleeping inside of me.

The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.

Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.

The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education

Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw,

The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.

I do not mourn the loss of my sister because she will always be with me, in my heart," she says. "I am, however, rather annoyed that my Tara has left me to suffer you lot alone. I do not see as well without her. I do not hear as well without her. I do not feel as well without her. I would be better off without a hand or a leg than without my sister. Then at least she would be here to mock my appearance and claim to be the pretty one for a change. We have all lost our Tara, but I have lost a part of myself as well.

At Tara in this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with its power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By God's almighty help and grace Between myself and the powers of darkness!

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

I'm a quirky, intelligent, dark haired chick!   Me, me, me, pick me!   And who the hell keeps whining and ruining my perfect moment?   I will cut a bitch.

First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.

I had been out of the game for too long. I couldn’t even get drunk and flirt anymore. I could however, get drunk and look like a stroke victim.

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, watcha gonna do when they cut your wiener,” Gavin sang as he pointed his gun at random objects. “Wow, cops have gotten pretty hardcore lately” Carter muttered.

Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.

I quickly tried to do the math but my brain was a jumbled mess and I couldn’t remember what number comes after potato!

Did you see that? The fuck I give. It went that way.

To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.

Pussy punch: when a twat tap just isn't enough

Water? At a wedding? I don’t understand,” he asks in confusion. “Did you invite Jesus? That’s the only way that will be acceptable.

I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.

I remember that night fondly. And by fondly, I mean with bitter resentment toward all things alcoholic and with a penis.

Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.

Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.

Who keeps putting alcohol in my alcohol?

Spitters are Quitters

I shouldn't be allowed to think when I'm drinking.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!" It was...Dumbledore!

Good judgment comes from bad experience. Unfortunately, most of that comes from bad judgment. - Tara Daniels -

I suddenly had a vision of my sperm swimming around and talking in Bruce Willis’s voice like in Look Who’s Talking. “Come on! Swim faster! This little shit has no idea we escaped from the condom! Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!

The Burgess sisters arrived together. Tara and Lainie do a little bit of everything. Sometimes dancers, sometimes actresses. Once they were librarians, but that is a subject they will only discuss if heavily intoxicated.

All I know is I make sense to me- it's other people who seem complicated.

Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.

Love is blind, there was no doubt about it. In Tara's case it was also deaf, dumb, dyslexic, had a bad hip and the beginnings of Alzheimer's

Oh Sweet Jesus. Sweet mother fucking fuckery of fucks.

No one likes an ugly crier. It's uncomfortable for all parties involved.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.

But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.

I was going to have to tell people I got fired from selling dildos. I can't even sell fake cocks to a room full or horny women. How do you come back from that shit?

I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.

In hind sight, telling him all strangers wanted to eat him wasn’t my finest hour. Having to explain to a bunch of crying children in line to see Santa why my kid was screaming ‘DON’T GO NEAR HIM! HE’LL EAT YOUR FINGERS!’ was no picnic.

Say it,” he whispers. “I missed out on this the first time. I want to hear you say it.

I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.

Ned?' he says, after a while. 'Oi, Ned?' 'What?' 'If someone says to you that the guy they're going out with doesn't have to prove how smart he is, what's your response?' 'That he's dumb.' 'And if he has a sixpack?' 'Dumb jock.' 'Not too intense.' 'Dumb jock with no personality.' 'And they see eye to eye?' Ned pauses. 'With the spitfire from Dili?' 'Same,' Tom corrects. Ned holds up a hand to where Tara would reach him in height. 'Dumb jock with no personality and short-man syndrome.' 'Thanks, Ned.' 'Anytime.

Imperfection is not our personal problem - it is a natural part of existing.

I MAY BE A HOGWARTS STUDENT...." Hargirid paused angrily. "BUT I AM ALSO A SATANIST!

I'm gonna make like a fetus and head out.

...why are straight people like this

I love you more than a hooker loves free VD testing day at the clinic

First loves can fuck you up.

Holy shit, did they just kill off that fish’s wife?” I blurted in shock. “Yep,” Gavin replied. “That big, mean fish ated her.” He said it so calmly – like it was no big deal that a sweet, loving cartoon fish just got murdered. What the fuck was wrong with this movie? This couldn’t be appropriate for kids. I didn’t think it was appropriate for me.

Aaarrggg, ahoy me matey, thars a great grand vagina over yonder." Penises talk like pirates when I'm drunk.

When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.

Normal is an ideal. But it’s not reality. Reality is brutal, it’s beautiful, it’s every shade between black and white, and it’s magical. Yes, magical. Because every now and then, it turns nothing into something.

Seriously? There was a condom brand called Rough Rider? Why not just go with F**k Her Hard and be done with it?

Your tits are like Bounty. The quicker dick picker upper.

The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.

Where did that flashlight come from?" Chloe asked. "My purse." Chloe looked at Tara. "She carries a flashlight in her purse." "For emergencies," Maddie said, trying to see into the yard. "You have any chocolate?" Chloe asked hopefully. "For emergencies?" "Of course. Side Pocket, next to the fork.

This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.

And let’s face it people, no one is ever honest with you about child birth. Not even your mother.       “It’s a pain you forget all about once you have that sweet little baby in your arms.”     Bullshit.   I CALL BULLSHIT.   Any friend, cousin, or nosey-ass stranger in the grocery store that tells you it’s not that bad is a lying sack of shit.   Your vagina is roughly the size of the girth of a penis.   It has to stretch and open andturn into a giant bat cave so the life-sucking human you’ve been growing for nine months can angrily claw its way out.   Who in their right mind would do that willingly?   You’re just walking along one day and think to yourself, “You know, I think it’s time I turn my vagina into an Arby’s Beef and Cheddar (minus the cheddar) and saddle myself down for a minimum of eighteen years to someone who will suck the soul and the will to live right out of my body so I’m a shell of the person I used to be and can’t get laid even if I pay for it.

Your friends are at the house.' I sit up, straight. 'Who'? 'I don't know. Weird people. The Sullivan girl, whose father got the Gosford police to pick you up.' 'Siobhan?' 'And another one who's making cups of tea for everyone, and keeping the boy who's telling Luca fart jokes away from the girl who says he's "the last bastion of patriarchal poor taste".' 'Justine, Thomas and Tara.' And the drug fiend, Jimmy, is keeping Mia calm and the Trombal boy's rung about ten times. I don't like his manner on the phone.' 'You won't like any guy's manner on the phone.

You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.

So I ring Justine Kalinsky and I say, "It's Francesca Spinelli," and she says, "Francesca, you've got to stop using last names. How are you doing?" and I say "I feel like shit", and I don't know how it happens, but by eight o'clock that night I'm lying next to her on the couch with Siobhan and Tara and we're eating junk food and watching a Keanu movie. And I want to stay on that couch for the rest of my life.

All the baby books written by women who had the most perfect birth experience in the world said you should talk to your child in the womb. That was about the only piece of advice I took from those things. Every day I told him if he ruined my vagina I would video tape his birth and show all his future girlfriends what happened to your who-ha when you had sex, ensuring that he will never, ever get laid.

I should have sold you to that traveling circus when you were four.

The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being "without anxiety about imperfection.

Oh my God, I sent a picture of my boobs to Jim," I moaned as a fresh wave of nausea rolled through me. "You also threw up in the emergency room parking lot, called Drew and told him you were the Donkey Punch Dick Queen and filled out a Last Will and Testament on a Burger King napkin and then asked the drive-thru worker to notarize it.

Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.

Granted, she was obviously one lick away from riding the short bus

He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.

All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.

I should ask her to marry me now. If I do it while she's coming, she probably won't be able to say no. It would be physically impossible. Like performing a sex exorist. THE POWER OF THE ORGASM COMPELS YOU!

I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

Claire was going to hate me. Our son was sucked into the pits of hell while I was watching General Hospital. God damn you Brenda and Sonny for making me lose focus.

What would it be like if I could accept life--accept this moment--exactly as it is?

You know what happens when you assume things?” I left out a sigh. “You make an ass out of you and me.” … “No, you just make an ass out of you. Me, I would never be this assy

I love both of you exactly the way you are. I love that you have no filter, and I adore that Gavin can make grown men cry. There is not one thing I would change about either of you, and if anyone doesn’t like it, they can kiss my ass. You guys are my life and my family now. Nothing else matters.

It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.

Sudenly a gothic old man flu in on his broomstick. He had lung black hair and a looong black bread. He wus werring a blak robe dat sed 'avril lavigne' on da back. He shotted a spel and Vlodemort ran away. It was...DUMBLYDORE!

But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.

Kau tahu, Nak, sepotong intan terbaik dihasilkan dari dua hal, yaitu, suhu dan tekanan yang tinggi di perut bumi. Semakin tinggi suhu yang diterimanya, semakin tinggi tekanan yang diperolehnya, maka jika dia bisa bertahan, tidak hancur, dia justeru berubah menjadi intan yang berkilau tiada tara. Keras. Kokoh. Mahal harganya. “Sama halnya dengan kehidupan, seluruh kejadian menyakitkan yang kita alami, semakin dalam dan menyedihkan rasannya, jika kita bisa bertahan, tidak hancur, maka kita akan tumbuh menjadi seseorang berkarakter laksana intan. Keras. Kokoh.

I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

I turned around to see Jim standing in the aisle with a smirk and a box of tampons in his hand. “Very funny asshole. Looks like you’re on the rag this week. Make sure to get yourself some Midol and a copy of Terms of Endearment so you can have yourself a good cry.

I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.

Tara. I'm a vampire," Pearl said. "Yeah, whatever, and I'm queen of the sea." "Your Marine Majesty, I'm a vampire," Pearl said. Concentrating, she slid her fangs out. "Tara. Tara!" She curled back her lips to expose the points. "See" Tara screamed. "I won't hurt you," Pearl said. Calm down. Sheesh." Tara continued to scream. Pearl considered biting her merely to shut her up. Regrettably that would be counter productive. Studying her nails, she waited for Tara to quit screaming. She noticed that Tara didn't try to exit the car, which was an interesting choice. "You aren't running away," Pearl said. "Duh, it's raining outside," Tara said.

There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.

We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

I am plenty romantic. Just this morning while he slept, I had left Carter a box of his favorite candy next to his pillow - Globs: piles of white chocolate covered, crushed potato chips and pretzels drizzled with caramel. I figured it would soften him up to the note I placed next to the box telling him if he left the toilet seat up one more time and my ass got an involuntary bath at six in the morning, I would put super glue on the head of his penis while he slept. I had even signed the note with a couple of Xs and Os. Who says romance is dead?

Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Radical Acceptance directly dismantles the very foundations of this trance.

I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: "It is a subject on which nothing final can be known." The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations. Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.

The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.

Right when my fingers started to slip inside my underwear, I opened my eyes and screamed.     "HOLY SHIT!"     My son stood there next to the bed just staring at me. Seriously, two inches from my face just staring at me like those creepy twins in "The Shining." I waited for him to start saying, "Come play with us" in their freaky twin voices while I tried not to have a heart attack.     "Gavin, seriously. You can't just stand here and stare at mommy. It's weird," I grumbled as I put my hand to my aching head and tried to calm my pounding heart.       Sweet Jesus, who kicked me in the head and shit in my mouth last night?     "You said a bad word, Mommy,

Give me a cat over a kid any day.   You can open up a bag of Meow Mix, plop it down on the floor next to a bucket of water, go on vacation for a week, and come home to an animal that is so busy licking it’s own ass that it has no idea you were even gone.   You can’t do that with a kid.   Well, I guess you could, but I’m sure it’s frowned upon in most circles.   And if my kid could lick his own ass, I’d have saved a shit load of money on diapers, I can tell you that.