The collection / 11 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

I was firmly in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind camp, and had cogent, unflinchingly honest declarations I frequently made about losing a shared context, and sentimentalism, and the general faint hearted ness of most people-but I knew there were people in the world who remained friends, for life, with bunk mates from sleepaway camp, and this was that group of people.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

02Undated

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

03Undated

My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

04Undated

every session I had no fewer than sixteen girls with “allergies” to dairy and wheat—cheese and bread basically—but also to garlic, eggplant, corn, and nuts. They had cleverly developed “allergies,” I believe, to the foods they had seen their own mothers fearing and loathing as diet fads passed through their homes. I could’ve strangled their mothers for saddling these girls with the idea that food is an enemy—some of them only eight years old and already weird about wanting a piece of bread—and I would’ve liked to bludgeon them, too, for forcing me to participate in their young daughters’ fucked-up relationship with food.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

05Undated

This is the crepe. This is the cider. This is how we live and eat.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

06Undated

I knew that I did not want to go to that juvenile diversion program because I had an intuitive sense that it would turn me irrevocably into the kind of character that I was now only rehearsing to be.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

07Undated

I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being-- the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person-- than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

08Undated

Be careful what you get good at doin', cuz you'll be doin' it for the rest of your life.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

09Undated

[I] like to be anchored by routine, not shackled by it.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

10Undated

It's promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by olive trees. But it's not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don't come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline.

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote

11Undated

Alone on the terrace looking up at the stars I would not feel lonely. With him glued to the screen, I feel gutted...

Gabrielle Hamilton / quote