Carlene Bauer > Quotes

“Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you're thinking bloom upon your face, and I can't think of anything else I'd rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“I am in no mood to fulminate on paper--I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“Rose and I did not become friends immediately, although I’d been aware of her before we met. She’d been writing for the Voice, for the New York Press, for Time Out. But never for the Times, I noticed with relief. I’d stare at her byline on the subway or in a bodega thinking Who is this girl doing my job? I’d sit on the subway reading her pieces, listening to the voice of a girl that was louder than ink and larger than column inches, I might have written at the time, if I had to review the sound Rose made. A girl unafraid to lose herself in a description of the physical pleasure the music gave her and unafraid of turning lethally bemused when the music failed her. The display, and the confidence it took to put it out there and keep it coming, was infuriating.”
― Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

“It makes me think that a marriage of true minds - to again quote Shakespeare - is in many ways just dumb luck.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“I had started to believe that I might love her in some way. I came to her room late at night once when I was drunk, shouting, throwing myself at her because I wanted her to respect me more that I thought she did. I wanted her to want me more than she did- I mean, I didn't want her to look at me as if I were a child, I wanted her to look at me with hunger.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“A man always wants his friends to be a little in love with his beloved too.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“You and I are so different: I am one word at a time one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how surely footing is before proceeding to the next sentence with ruminative breaks for buttered toast and coffee.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“But the point is that is takes real work for a woman to sustain the creation of something outside herself that is not a child. Real will, because we are always going to be tempted in a way men aren’t to wander off the road and find some place to get knocked up so we can relieve ourselves of the burden of trying to figure out what everything in life is really worth, and then, as a reward for this abdication of responsibility, get ourselves worshipped as if we’d climbed Mount Everest when all we’d done was let nature take its course.”
― Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

“But women are awful for the same reason men are awful: limited scope.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“The last thing I remember: nestling up close to him, as close as I could get, the front of my knees locked into the back of his, burying my face in his shoulder blades, thinking that his skin smelled like skies heavy with rain.”
― Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

“He was an extremely intelligent boy-slash-man from a working- to middle-class family—from what, if he got drunk enough, he called trash—and those two biographical coordinates have always worked on me the way a handsome face never could. His weekly emails to the staff were small masterpieces chiseled out of wit, both anarchic and dry, and what I suspected was creeping intellectual boredom.”
― Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

“Everyone has their own New York, and this was ours.”
― Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

“They understand that annoyance is a fair price to pay for the strange protective love of the family.”
― Carlene Bauer

“... but I couldn't quite believe that sex was the motivating force behind all human behavior, and that I was left out of the great cultural conversation because I had not been initiated into the mystery.”
― Carlene Bauer

“To be a mother meant to die inside, constantly, so that everyone else could live. No thanks.”
― Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

“Dear Uncle Bernard -
Your niece Frances - a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of h baby fat - thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I've never been one to spend time thinking about why men and women take to each other, or why they don't. I think it can turn a lady neurotic, a term I despise but also am loath to have turned in my direction.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“The Beats are really nothing more than a troop of malevolent Boy Scouts trying to earn badges for cultural arson.”
― Carlene Bauer

“She will find it less necessary to carve out of you what needs to be carved out because she has someone else now who needs her knife.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“I filled out my workbooks, read through the Bible, and learned hardly anything of academic worth during my year and a half at this first Christian school... What they really meant to teach us at this school was that the world was a poxed and pustuled old thing, diseased by our pride and greed, headed for destruction.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“...but I was not very good at hiding my displeasure at mental sleepiness and mediocrity”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“Our second Christian school was a real school, not a bunker for indoctrination.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“Somewhere in this period I moved, for the first time, into an apartment by myself. A junior one bedroom between Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Park Slope. To be able to live alone, in such a quiet, light-filled, tree-shaded trio of rooms, for $850 a month - I felt incredibly lucky. I woke up to birds. So many birds, in the spring, it was as if the tree outside my front windows held one hundred nine-year-old girls on a Skittles high.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“I'd send a peach pie through the mail but I trust only Jersey peaches and it looks like they don't let them into the city.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“Until then, my teenage soul--suspicious of cheerfulness, though still reflexively respectful of authority--would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the official soul. The official soul, as transmitted through church and Christian paraphernalia, was upbeat, incurious, happy with its lot. It did not have any heroes other than the ones who appeared in the Bible, and it was content to hear the same stories about these people over and over again. It described pain and suffering in such a way that a person might think alcoholism or the loss of a child were no more inconvenient than a tussle with the flu: after it passed, you could stand in front of the congregation on Sunday and testify that it was all better, and God was good. As far as I could tell, that was the only story told by the official soul, and the real and true sadnesses had be excised for a more mellifluous account. Which made it seem as if there were things you couldn't talk about in church, or with people from church--what made you laugh, why you cried at a movie, what made you angry, or what books you read that hadn't been written by C.S. Lewis, A.W. Tozer, or D.L. Moody. Church was supposed to be the most important thing in life, but so much of life was left out, because so much of its trouble was assumed to be conquered. My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair--the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It's the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson — American dynamism gilded onto a platform of individual redemption. It's religion as detergent.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“A moving and thoughtful story of how desire and ambition change over time and how to make sense of the messiness of carving out a path and life”
― Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

“If you taught kindergarten, you would always know for sure that you were the adult in the room and that you were inarguably the person in charge.”
― Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About

“... when I am walking down the street to meet him and I know that I have come into his view, and his eyes, as I approach, are giving off sparks of both hunger and affection, the two fighting it out like cats in his pupils, I feel that I would do anything to have that look cast upon me for the rest of my days. I feel that I am known more intimately than perhaps God knows me. And now I have blasphemed, so please burn this letter.”
― Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

“...to be Catholic was to belong to an ethnic group, not a religion. You didn’t really have to believe it, or act like you believed it, to be a Catholic. You just had to show up every week for Mass and go to Catholic school.”
― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir

“My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair - the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.”
― Carlene Bauer