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Anthropology of an American Girl QUOTES

Anthropology of an American Girl QUOTES

1 " If she could no longer be called beautiful, she possessed something better-a knowledge of beauty; it’s inflated value, it’s inevitable loss. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

2 " ...someone who knows she is beautiful, who is always told that she is beautiful, but who, deep down, does not feel very beautiful. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

3 " They were sorting, or classifying. It's easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clothes, that person is still the enemy, only of a more contemptible, less terrifying variety- "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

4 " It's better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won't get it. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

5 " And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart. (p. 37) "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

6 " We are spontaneous when we are at our genuine best. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

7 " Lying is a full time occupation, even if you tell just one, because once you tell it, you're stuck with it. If you want to do it right, you have to visualize it, conjure the graphics, tone, and sequence of action, then relate it purposefully in the midst of seemingly spontaneous dialogue. The more actual the lie becomes to the listener, the more actual it becomes to the teller, which is scariest of all. Some people really get to believing their own lies. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

8 " It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage -- the surest means to success, the surest course to failure. (p. 72) "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

9 " When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

10 " Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to display. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves -- this way those who do succumb to sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. Girls demand a covenant because if one gives in, others will be expected to do the same. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. Or we are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

11 " Having to talk to people was the one thing, but soliciting conversation was something else. If I acted squirmy or didn't make eye contact, they would want to know what was wrong, and I would have to say, Nothing, since nothing really was wrong. Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

12 " The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die. (p. 240) "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

13 " Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."
Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.
But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness."
He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder.
True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz."
You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95) "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

14 " If friendship is like a cathedral, then forsaken friendship is like roofless ruins... "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

15 " Getting lost just means not understanding. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

16 " Since he knew things at the beginning, maybe at the end he knew things too. That we had gone as far as chance would take us. That nothing is more sacred than youth or more hopeful than turning yourself over to someone and saying ~ I have this time, it is not a long time, but it is my best time and my best gift, and I give it to you. When I revisit my youth, I re-visit you. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

17 " Kindness is everything . . . When you receive it and express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. It's life, demystified. A place out of self. Not a waltz, the the whirls within a waltz. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

18 " The most awful hunger is the type that is satisfied too soon, before it moves you, before you are moved by it, before it becomes protracted and superior, a motivating business, making you honorable, graceful, clever - a hunter. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

19 " Mr. O'Donnell was at the library counter, performing the sort of grim rituals librarians perform with index cards and stumpy pencils and those rubber stamps with columns of rotating numbers. "Ms. Auerbach! What will it be today? Camus? Cervantes?" "Actually I'm looking for a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson"

He paused somberly, toying with the twirled tip of his mustache. No matter how seriously librarians are engaged in their work, they are always glad to be interrupted when the theme is books. It makes no difference to them how simple the search is or how behind on time either of you might be running - they consider all queries scrupulously. They love to have their knowledge tested. They lie in wait, they will not be rushed. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl

20 " Jocks were pretty much exempt from the standards that bound the rest of us. Teachers and administrators humor them because it's in everyone's interests to coax them through school and get them out of the building. Since it's unethical to turn them loose on society, they get sent to college to be kept out of the mix until their frontal lobes develop more fully. As enticement they are given sports scholarships that will later amount to nothing, not even good health. "

― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl