69 Quotes by Kim Brooks

Lke so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class.

I struggled with math and had no interest in sports.

I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.

Sometimes we do things not because they're fun but because they're important.

When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.

I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa.

I got an MFA in fiction.

I've written out itineraries for baby sitters with years of experience. I've gotten up in the middle of the night and stood over my children's sleeping bodies just to make sure they're breathing, and breathing well. In short, I'm the worst Jewish mother in the world. I make Alexander Portnoy's mother look like a laid-back Earth mama.

What an awful burden we mothers and fathers, Jewish and not, have to bear - to hatch a thing we love more than ourselves into a world so fundamentally unworthy.