Quotes from Ali Liebegott

I'd gotten the message in my home, starting with my grandfather, that real work, the kind that makes you sweat and gets your hands dirty, is a respectable, necessary thing. But I wanted to write - and writing didn't qualify. Whenever I told my parents I dreamed of becoming a writer, they said, 'Great, but what are you going to do for work?'

I don't really believe in the myth of being poor but happy. At the poorest times in my life, I wasn't happy. I was just hungry.

Lots of people hate gay people. You can tell who they are because they start sentences with, It's not like I hate gay people.

do you or don't you know the two worlds I'm talking about, the world that doesn't exist where you wish you could be on the dirt road that stretches out of Idaho away from the cave and family? The girl you want lives there. All my life I've wanted to be the grand gesture that forces the mouth open in disbelief Instead I was the lamp cord, collecting dust and never moving. It's easy to be the destroyed one.

Shift #5 for Seamus Heaney a box of coconut water two cans of coconut milk so many looking for help some people care when a poet dies a poem is a conscience a report card, a confession: today my lies were a motor that spun the Earth how can you get truth from a hill when I am the continent that drifts? how can I taste what I'm mourning when soon everything will be salt from the sea?

Since becoming an alleged adult, I've always felt like I should exercise - or should at least want to exercise - and make a feeble attempt at health, thus staving off terrible things like the coronary heart disease and high cholesterol described to me in 1980s margarine commercials.

I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.

I'm always wondering what is the job that gives the writer the most amount of time to write. I still don't know what the answer is as someone who has taught and is now working at a grocery store.

There's something very soothing about the simplicity of doing what's right in front of you: paying the rent, buying groceries, and when there's a little extra for a treat like cinnamon rolls, whoopee! When you live paycheck to paycheck, you only have so much to lose.

In times of uncertainty - whether it's economic, psychological, emotional, or philosophical - people often say that the only thing we can truly control is our attitudes. If that's true, then I'm going to spend today walking my 14-year-old dog on a free beach and treasuring the fact that she's still alive.

When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles.

I was the first in my family to go to college, and I waitressed all the way through, using my earnings to pay for a bachelor's degree first and then a master's. I resented classmates who didn't have to work real jobs, the ones who had the luxury of taking unpaid internships that would eventually position them for high-paying careers.

For me writing is so perplexing, because if we were playing ping pong and we weren't writing - twenty years later you'd be just so much better at ping pong and this confidence with ping pong.