15 Quotes by Jennifer Traig

We are legion, an army of millions. Though most of us will go to any length to hide our compulsions, we recognize one another. The guy using a paper towel to turn the restroom doorknob, the child counting his eyelashes, the old man wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes - these are my brothers. We are a secret tribe. We're like Freemasons, except that our secret handshake is followed by a vigorous washing session.

Every time a girl refuses to eat, she one-ups Eve.

The Cat in the Hat became a massive bestseller, allowing Geisel to quit his day job and start building the Seuss empire. This included not just books but words: a master neologian, he invented the terms oobleck, grinch, and nerd.

Then there’s Russell and Lillian Hoban’s Frances series, which is almost unbearably wistful, and no wonder: written just before the Hobans’ marriage ended, the books seem to document a happy family that was dissolving as they wrote.

It remains culturally relevant in Germany, home of the Struwwelpeter Museum as well as the industrial metal band Rammstein, which made the book the subject of a song.

If the mother can’t afford to hire a nurse, she should pretend she is one herself: “she must look upon herself while performing the functions of a nurse as a professional woman and not as a sentimentalist masquerading under the name of ‘Mother.

She slept with her parrot, which she forced to lie on its back, using slaps to overrule the animal’s every natural impulse to not sleep on its back in a bed. Eventually, she’d kill it by washing it in soap and water and setting it to dry before the fire. When she washed her lamb – in the ocean – she dried it by burying it up to its nose in the sand. She did other odd things, like trying to force a blindfolded donkey to swim; and of course, writing a dozen utterly terrifying books for children.

Not for nothing did H. L. Mencken define Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

By sixteen months, they know what bothers their siblings and will annoy them on purpose.