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A Girl Named Zippy QUOTES

A Girl Named Zippy QUOTES

1 " I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn't have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

2 " That cat doesn't have a lick of sense,' I said, sighing.

Well, honey, he's not right in the head,' Dad said, flipping his cigarette into the front yard.

I glared at him. 'And just what do you mean by that?'

Dad counted on his fingers. 'He's cross-eyed; he jumps out of trees after birds and then doesn't land on his feet; he sleeps with his head smashed up against the wall, and the tip of his tail is crooked.'

Oh yeah? Well, how about this: he once got locked in a basement by evil Petey Scroggs in the middle of January and survived on snow and little frozen mice. When I'm cold at night he sleeps right on my face. Of that whole litter of kittens he came out of he's the only one left. One of his brothers didn't even have a butthole.'

I stand corrected. PeeDink is a survivor. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

3 " What kind of good deeds? Like Girl Scouts? Because I got kicked out of Brownies and they won't give me another chance to keep my clothes on at camp. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

4 " Decoupage hit Mooreland pretty hard... "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

5 " But I think that what you'll discover more and more as you get older is that most people aren't thinking about you at all. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

6 " ...she waited until she and my grandfather Anthel were just home from their honeymoon, and then sat him down and told him this: "Honey, I know you like to take a drink, and that's all right, but be forewarned that I ain't your maid and I ain't your punching bag, and if you ever raise your hand to me you'd best kill me. Because otherwise I'll wait until you're asleep; sew you into the bed; and beat you to death with a frying pan." Until he died, I am told, my grandfather was a gentle man. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

7 " They did a lot of cleaning in their house, which I considered to be a sign of immoral parenting. The job of parents, as I saw it, was to watch television and step into a child's life only when absolutely necessary, like in the event of a tornado or a potential kidnapping. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

8 " I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, now get up and do what your mother says. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

9 " My mother was good at reading books, making cinnamon biscuits, and coloring in a coloring book. Also she was a good eater of popcorn and knitter of sweaters with my initials right in them. She could sit really still. She knew how to believe in God and sing really loudly. When she sneezed our whole house rocked. My father was a great smoker and driver of vehicles..He could hold a full coffee cup while driving and never spill a drop, even going over bumps. He lost his temper faster than anyone. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

10 " Contrary to popular opinion, my dad was not a lazy man. He was not lazy at all, for instance, when it came to Going Places In His Truck. He was also very industrious about Preparing To Go Camping. And if something really interested him, he would work on it all day. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

11 " I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad's truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasoline. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

12 " The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

13 " I once heard her tell a friend that she was, in fact, a 120-pound woman, but she kept herself wrapped in fat in order to prevent bruising. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

14 " Honey, I know you like to take a drink, and that's all right, but be forewarned that I ain't your maid and I ain't your punching-bag, and if you ever raise your hand to me you'd best kill me. Because otherwise I'll wait till you're asleep; sew you into the bed; and beat you to death with a frying pan. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

15 " The book was so clean and white, and the letters were so perfectly black and defenseless; it would have been like tearing the ears off a kitten. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

16 " I could no longer look at him. I wished, in fact, for blindness. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

17 " It was an Indian summer afternoon in Indiana, a rare gift. We walked home slowly. I thought Mom might be wrong about me having all I needed, but just at that moment, I had no need to complain. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

18 " in the 1970s people still referred to my mother as a Communist because she had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly, "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

19 " Well, I’m here to tell you: I’ve seen women passionately devoted to men who couldn’t pile bricks, and whole families of slack-jawed nose pickers held together by “love,” not to mention all those people who curl up at night with dogs that have gunk running out of their eyes, dogs who earlier peed where they were about to walk and spent ten minutes licking their own wormy butts. "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy

20 " I got kicked out of Brownies and they won’t give me another chance to keep my clothes on at camp. Also "

― Haven Kimmel , A Girl Named Zippy