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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Koren Zailckas

Even years from now, once I’ve stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it’s good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it’s toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn’t buy into the bullshit about temperance.

black-and-white, excess, excessiveness, extreme, extremes, hoard, lack-of-moderation, moderation, passionate-life, too-little, too-much, too-much-of-a-good-thing, worth

It’s meant I will act like less of an asshole, but feel much more like one.

I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight…I agree.

alcohol, moderation

But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.

alcohol, college

I’m sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, “Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol.” To which I always respond, “I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?

alcoholism, irony

Violet remembered that slap; later her mother had called it a “love tap,” as if to further confuse love with pain.

It’s not rocking the boat, Dad. It’s called communication. You’re allowed to ask questions. Other people do it all the time. Other people don’t live in fear of someone else’s reactions. They don’t relentlessly stress out about getting into trouble.

abuse, abusive-relationships, communication-skills

That’s the thing about social drinking: In the end, it’s the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you’re there, really there inside that moment, with its neighbourly warmth and conversation, it’s hard to tell what’s responsible for producing emotion. What’s responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who’s running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you’re drunk, or because you’re connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced?

I’m trying to figure out precisely which character flaw might be responsible for my latest life failure.

life-and-living

My demeanor isn’t that of a woman enraged. To see me slumped, glassy-eyed, holding a sandwich someone has cut for me into four “manageable” pieces, a person might tell you I look much more like a woman subdued.

anger, anger-impressions, angry, break-up, break-ups, depression, sad-but-funny, sadness

My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen’s guards. They’d been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I’d had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.

boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, love, relationships, stoicism

I’d written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one’s own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I’d made a habit–and eventually a profession–of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

emotion, emotions, families, family, family-therapy, memoir, writing-craft, writing-from-the-heart, writing-life, writing-process, writing-style