Susan Jane Gilman > Quotes

“Good girls don't hurt other people's feelings. Good girls are not overly aggressive, competitive, or boastful. Good girls please others. But what good girls are good for is another question.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess

“Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow- minded culture.”
― Susan Jane Gilman

“WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen. I wanted to be everything at once: a prima ballerina, an actress, a model, a famous artist, a nurse, an Ice Capades dancer, and Batgirl. I spent inordinate amounts of time waltzing around our living room with a doily on my head, imagining in great detail my promenade down the runway as the new Miss America, during which time I would also happen to receive a Nobel Prize for coloring.”
― Susan Jane Gilman

“A girl doesn't need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot. Certainly I, at least, never have.”
― Susan Jane Gilman

“Everybody thinks that once you reach the top, you can lie back on a divan with a goddamn mai tai. No. Wrong. Success is not a mountain climb. Success is a treadmill.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“Besides, nobody ever loves you the way you want.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“That's the thing about luxury, darlings. The moment you become accustomed to it, it is no longer a luxury but a necessity. People forget this.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“...weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations -- many of which they've been cultivating since the day you were born.”
― Susan Jane Gilman

“Approximately seventy percent of the female population is on a diet at any given time. More women diet than vote.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess

“I’m aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I’d ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I’ve glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I’ve sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

“Everything became a metaphor, a talisman, a sign that I was still actually connected to people—that I wasn’t so completely on my own.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

“Fine watches, I’d been told, were like rich people themselves: You could barely discern them working.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“Clowns—feh! All that ghastly, forced gaiety, worse than New Year’s Eve.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“One of the benefits of TM, Agatha had said, was that it enabled you to be "alone with your thoughts." But as I quickly discovered, a lot of my thoughts were not anything I wanted to be alone with.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress: Tales of Growing up Groovy and Clueless

“Only the United States of America deemed ice cream “an essential item for troop morale.” And so it alone continued producing, ordering ice cream freezers on submarines, ice cream freezers on tankers, ice cream freezers on cargo ships. Over the course of the war, the United States military became the largest ice cream manufacturer in history.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“People are not sophisticated. They see dark, they think “bad,” “shady,” “untrustworthy.” They see light, they think “clean,” “pure,” “fresh.” Jason tells me this is racist. So sue me: I’m just saying what I’ve observed. In the ice cream industry, you always want your chocolate-based flavors to appear creamy, not earthy or bitter. Our Devil’s Food Cake, our Molten Fudge, our Cocoa-Loco. Marvelous flavors, all of them, but most of them sat in the cases for weeks, slowly crystallizing. Vanilla, meanwhile, is the number-one-selling flavor in America. You can’t tell me this is simply because of the taste. Not when you have rum raisin available. Or mint chip. Yet Aryanism still carries the day, darlings, even in the ice cream freezer. I don’t like this any more than you do. But there it is.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“him lazy and stupid, they lashed his knuckles”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“eerily”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

“Who the hell knows where they get these farkakte names for their kids. One of Rita's friends named her son Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva Rosenblatt. Can you imagine? Rita always says, 'It's no big deal. They call him 'Bodi', is all.' Please. And the newspapers say I'm abusive to children?”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“Happy hour?" Jason says. "It's barely noon, Grams"
"Oh, shush, you. You'll have some, yes?'
"Well"-he smiles slyly and wiggles his eyebrows-"if you insist". Every time, it's the same thing. Leaning in, he rubs his hands together expectantly. The drinking age in New York State was raised last year, so technically, I suppose, this is still illegal for my grandson. But the Jews didn't spend forty years wandering the desert so that I could forfeit a gin and tonic with my progeny...”
― Susan Jane Gilman

“Vittorio, Pasquale, and Rocco had gotten into the habit of lowering the shades and huddling around one of the café tables with a bottle. As the radio played late into the night, they talked quietly—or not at all—until the broadcasts stopped altogether and the three of them stumbled home. Sometimes when I came in early in the mornings to inspect the milk deliveries, I found the wireless still on, spitting static. “Can I show you how we can save money?” I said, opening the ledger. Vittorio put up his hand as if to signal, Stop. “Is it legal?” he said, staring at the bottle in the center of the table. “Of course.” I laughed. “Do I need to sign anything?” “Perhaps later.” “Then just let me know if I do. Leave it for me on the”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“autumn of 1918, I had just started fifth grade when signs began popping up in windows and on doors, on broadsheets plastered on streetlamps around the neighborhood. Suddenly big public gatherings were being discouraged; taverns, moving-picture houses, soda fountains—even churches—grew empty. Nobody knew what it was exactly, except that it started quickly, with a cough and a fever.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“age is so humiliating, darlings. After a while, there is simply no camouflaging your deterioration, and no one ever sees all the strengths you’ve acquired along the way.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“Whenever I think of these things, I feel an exquisite pang of longing. I feel oddly depressed; it's almost like I know too much simply to be in the moment anymore, to enjoy what I used to relish so uncritically. I'm aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I'd ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I've glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I've sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

“You scare them, Ma,” Isaac says. Why? Because I made them all sign confidentiality agreements? Because I speak my mind and know exactly what I want? Why should I pretend people are doing me a favor when I’m paying them? I have no use for that sort of nonsense. Once”
― Susan Jane Gilman, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“I called her "the Chiquita Banana Lady" and I meant it as a compliment: who didn't want to look adorable with a pile of fruit on her head?”
― Susan Jane Gilman

“You're not a Communist, Ma," my father would say with irritation.
"You're an alcoholic. There's a difference.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven