Home > Author > Alison Umminger
1 " Roger was like the Edgar Allen Poe of stupid people. He'd been making movies about women who were dead or dying, who didn't have much to say, for as long as his stringy hair had been ponytailed into a cliché. "
― Alison Umminger , American Girls
2 " Before my mom decided she was a lesbian, I thought lesbians were all these really nice, earthy, crunchy, let's smother you with our twenty extra pounds of lady love and fight the power people. "
― Alison Umminger
3 " He wasn't just a psychopath, he was an asshole. Who cares why anyone wanted to listen to him? "
4 " The devil you know" may be the saying, but crazy is always a million times more interesting when you're just getting introduced, shaking hands, and deciding whether or not you're going to give your real email address. "
5 " For someone who did a lot of yoga and had a peace sign tramp stamp on her lower back, she sure could be a bitch. "
6 " Never underestimate the power of youth - not in Los Angeles, at any rate. You can never be too young or too dumb. "
7 " When we studied the 1920s, he pretended that cell phones were illegal and made half the class narcs, and then he had us read The Great Gatsby. "
8 " The real danger wasn’t violence like you saw on the television news, random and exciting—the real danger was the vampiric kind, the sort that you invited in because it told you everything you wanted to hear. Charles Manson could never have been Charles Manson if there hadn’t been girls by the dozen, ready and willing, scarred by the silent cruelty behind those carefully locked doors. "
9 " People like to imagine that they get a girl who's been depressed, or confused, or desperate, and it's so romantic and exciting, but they definitely don't want to imagine what she might have really done. Trust me. I know of what I speak. Tragic is interesting but only if there was no collateral damage, and there always is. "
10 " Trying to assassinate the president should not be funny. It really shouldn't. It's not like I was cracking up when we read about Lincoln or JFK. But let's face it, they were real presidents. Gerald Ford ranks right up there with Millard Fillmore and Bush the First on the list of unexciting white men who have run this country, made their way into history books, and otherwise been human sleeping pills. If all the presidents had been television shows, Gerald Ford would probably have been a PBS fund drive. So I'd bet the fact that anyone would try to kill Gerald Ford, Gerald Rudolph Ford, was kind of hard to get excited about, even back in the day. "
11 " I didn't feel like doing much of anything except for staring out my sister's big open window and wishing there were someplace out there for me to land. "
12 " Everyone on staff seemed to realize that _Chips Ahoy!_ was like the chest acne of children's television, best covered up in the hope of growing out of it soon. "
13 " They got me glasses that were hip and cute, the kind adults like, but glasses are glasses. No kid has ever said: "Look at the hot new girl with the glasses. Maybe she'll have braces and a clubfoot too!" I think it made me cautious about other kids, because I was always one screwup from becoming "Four Eyes" on the playground. Those were the facts, like a card hand you couldn't fold. But beauty wasn't everything. I could still be the kind of girl who beat a table full of movie stars at poker. If I couldn't be datable, I could at least be respected. I was like the lady Godfather of plain-girl self-awareness. "
14 " China definitely sounded worse than Atlanta "
15 " I could remember the details of the meeting exactly. My dad had worn a pink shirt, the button-down kind that his new girlfriend, Cindy, probably bought him. She's a stylist, which means that she gets paid by adults to dress them in age-inappropriate clothing and then tell them that they look "hip." Atlanta is full of tight-assed, bleached-bond women who look twenty from behind and turn around to reveal their Botoxed, eight-thousand-year-old, veiny-handed glory. These were Cindy's clients. "
16 " I always thought that really beautiful people were kind of like stuffed animals, like they sat in corners and didn't say much of anything, because people loved them anyhow. But Jeremy was actually funny. "
