Laurie Notaro Quotes

#1. How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of your body the day after you eat it.

Laurie Notaro

#2. Asininity was puddling all around me in quantities too vast to soak up. - It Looked Different on the Model

Laurie Notaro

#3. Whaddaya mean 'old maids,' ha? The term is 'unclaimed treasure,' buddy, 'unclaimed treasure!

Laurie Notaro

#4. If you really believe in what you're doing, work hard, take nothing personally and if something blocks one route, find another. Never give up.

Laurie Notaro

#5. Be honest with yourself; set the alarm for the time the Real You will get up, not the Ambitious You, because the Ambitious You doesn't really exist.

Laurie Notaro

#6. I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want?

Laurie Notaro

#7. So I graduated from college with a degree in journalism and was ready to find my dream job at a newspaper in addition to one good man who owned his own car and was certain about his sexuality, my two new, revised qualifying criteria for a potential date.

Laurie Notaro

#8. I'm nicer on tax day than I am when I'm on deadline.

Laurie Notaro

#9. I've had to write a column an hour after I've come back from a funeral. A deadline is a deadline, I mean, that was just what my job was.

Laurie Notaro

#10. I don't think my Dad was ready for me to come back home, either. I think it had been a long time since he was forced to make conversation at the kitchen table over coffee, especially with the person who had been canceling out his vote in every single election since the mid-eighties.

Laurie Notaro

#11. It's okay," my husband said, shuffling toward his study. "I bought an electric-powered chain saw with a plug-in cord so if I run away fast enough, you can only chase me so far.

Laurie Notaro

#12. Knock, knock.
who's there?
it's cancer.
cancer who?
cancer of the section right behind your belly button that you have been trying to pass off as the pinch of ovulation. but it's not. it's cancer. it's me.

Laurie Notaro

#13. If Nana thinks you're trying to scam her, she'll tell you, and if she thinks you ruined her life by discontinuing Arnold's Thin bread, she'll let you know that, too. I guess when you spend eighty-seven years swallowing other people's bullshit, there comes a time when you gotta spit some back.

Laurie Notaro

#14. If there was a National Tweaker Olympics, Oregon would bring home the gold in every category (Living in Squalor, Poisoning Your Neighbors, Developing Facial Scabs, Public Aggression, Theft of Useless Things, Taking Stuff Apart, and Crazy Talking).

Laurie Notaro

#15. Is it just another pore expanding? God, I already have pores the size of pudding cups, that's the last thing I need, another pore ... to fill in with spackle.

Laurie Notaro

#16. I've never really considered doing stand up, but I have done readings/spoken word things fairly often in which I'll just tell a bunch of stories and run off at the mouth. I'm a big tangent person.

Laurie Notaro

#17. Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent.

Laurie Notaro

#18. Weddings, I began to understand, were vile, filthy things when they ran amuck.

Laurie Notaro

#19. It's a proclamation he regards as complete absolution from answering ... as if his last name was Bush, he was eighteen, and there was a draft going on.

Laurie Notaro

#20. Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.

Laurie Notaro

#21. Poor Holly. There she was, completely unaware while millions of minute mucus particles, each carrying the flu virus, exploded into the air like rain. It was their germ mission to land on her and try to find their way into an opening of her body, much like a date I once had attempted with me.

Laurie Notaro

#22. Sure, I'd like to lose some weight, but a tapeworm is the last way I'd like to do it, except becoming a prisoner of war.

Laurie Notaro

#23. How could I compete with that? Candies and toys! I had string and glue and some very complicated dynamics going on at my station. I mean, when I was assigned to that table, no one happened to mention that it was a simmering hotbed of political unrest concerning the lower case r. A wicked web indeed.

Laurie Notaro

#24. It's a well-known fact that black sheep should never have lambs. You know what you get when you take a black sheep and give it a lamb? You get a thing called "supervised visitation" that's what.

Laurie Notaro

#25. I have more faith in my bra than I have in my accountant.

Laurie Notaro

#26. Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching
and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book.

Laurie Notaro

#27. If you really want to be afraid for mankind, you don't even need to know who Paul Ryan is. All you have to do is lurk for five minutes by the pharmacy.

Laurie Notaro

#28. Hadn't one of my all-time favorite reveries been to become a cranky hermit, live unperturbed in my house, and have things brought to me like a monarch or tribal lord?

Laurie Notaro

#29. Once I had been jerked back to reality, like I was in a log on Splash Mountain and someone quickly applied the brakes, I knew this had been a terrible choice, but I was in it now. There was no getting out; there was no abandoning the mission.

Laurie Notaro

#30. I want a man as nice as my retarded dog, but one that doesn't crap on the floor.

Laurie Notaro

#31. I realized that you don't try on a pair of pants, fart in them, and then put them back on the shelf, and the same rough politeness applied here, too. Plain and simple, I bled on it, I bought it.

Laurie Notaro

#32. There is a (slight) chance that I might be going to hell.

Laurie Notaro

#33. You are basically a flophouse and a pimp away from Pepcid rehab, you know that? I informed Nana.

Laurie Notaro

#34. Everyone knows there's only one thing less welcome on a stage than a mime, and that's a clown, because everyone knows that clowns eat people.

Laurie Notaro

#35. There are things running around out there with uteruses,son. You're going to need this.

Laurie Notaro

#36. Oh, boy. Now you see what you've done, Monica Lewinsky, you stupid, stupid tart, I thought. Because of you, I have to explain to my Nana, while she's in a hospital bed with an enlarged gallbladder, what oral sex is. Do you see the damage you've caused? Do you see where your sinful path has led?

Laurie Notaro

#37. Suddenly, however, the dastardly department of my personality presented two plans, one of which involved dynamite, mustache wax, some rope, and train tracks ... which I rejected due to financial investment.

Laurie Notaro

#38. I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and serves as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I'd rather forget.

Laurie Notaro

#39. I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them.

Laurie Notaro

#40. Oh boy. Too drunk to hold on to a whiskey and Coke and the word "pretty." That's not a combination with a positive outcome. Not good at all. That's the secret password that usually leaves me trying to find a ride home in the morning.

Laurie Notaro