Looking For Alibrandi Quotes

“My name, by the way, is Josephine Alibrandi and I turned seventeen a few months ago. (The seventeen that Janis Ian sang about where one learns the truth.) I’m in my last year of high school at Sr. Martha’s, which is situated in the eastern suburbs, and next year I plan to study law. For the last five years we have been geared for this year. The year of the HSC (the High School Certificate), where one’s whole future can skyrocket or go down the toilet, or so they tell us.”

“My mother is pretty strict with me. My grandmother tries to put her two cents’ worth in as well, but Mama hates her butting in. The two of them are forever as loggerheads with each other. Like whenever school camp comes along, it’s fights galore. My grandmother thinks that if a member of our family isn’t looking after me I’ll get raped or murdered. She accuses my mother of being a bad mother for not caring enough and letting me go.”

“So not being able to go out a lot is one of my many problems. Mi biggest, though, is being stuck at a school dominated by rich people. Rich parents, rich grandparents. Mostly Anglo-Saxon Australians, who I can’t see having a problem in the world. Then there are the rich Europeans.”

“I bought this magazine in today, Sister, to speak to everyone about how insulted we are as teenagers and how important it is that we think for ourselves and not through magazines that exploit us under the guise of educating us.′ Sera, another friend of mine, poked her fingers down her mouth as if she was going to vomit. Sster and I stared at each other for a long time before she held out her hand again. I passed the magazine to her knowing she hand’t been fooled. ‘You can pick it up from Sister Louise,’ she said, referring to the principal.”

“Religion class, first period Monday morning, is the place to try to pull the wool over the eyes of Sister Gregory. (She kept her male saint’s name although the custom went out years ago. She probably thinks it will get he into heaven. I don’t think she realizes that feminism has hit religion and the female saints in heaven are probably also in revolt.) ‘Would you like to explain yourself, Josephine?’ ”

“So my final school year began. I had promised myself that I would be a saint for this year alone. I would make the greatest impression on my teachers and become the model student. I knew it would all fail. But just not on the first day. Sister Gregory walked toward me, and when she was so close that I could see her mustache, she held out her hand. ‘Show me what you’re reading.’ ”

“We live in Glebe, a suburb just outside the city center of Sydney and ten minutes away from the harbor. Glebe has two facades One is of beautiful tree-lined streets with gorgeous old homes, and the other, which is supposed to be trendy, has old terrace houses with views of outhouses and clothes-lines. I belong to the latter. Our house is an old terrace. We, my mother Christina and I, live on the top. We were actually renting the place till I was twelve, but the owner sold it to us for a great price, and although I’ve calculated that Mama will paid it off when I’m thirty-two, it’s good not to be rending in these days of housing problems.”

“Life outside school, though, was a different story. The reaction of the Italian mothers to my mother being unmarried drove my crazy at times. There is nothing terrible romantic about my mother’s supposed fall from grace. She slept with the boy next door when they were sixteen and before anything could be decided his family moved to Adelaide. Although he new she was pregnant he never bothered to contact her again.”

“I used to hear my illegitimacy mentioned during the first years at St. Martha’s, but nobody has spoken about it for ages. Still I wish someone else at school had a Bohemian mother who believed in free love back then. It’s an embarrassing contradiction when your mother’s get pregnant out of wedlock because her Catholic upbringing prohibits contraception. Even though the girls at St. Martha’s don’t mention it. I bet you they’re talking about me behind my back.”

“I could see the English guys who live on the bottom floor of our terrace house sitting on the front veranda, stripped to the waist and drinking beer. They used to be backpackers, living the youth hostel up the road, before deciding they wanted more privacy. I get on really well with one of them. His name is Gary and he’s from a place called Brighton in England. He always invites me for a cup of tea, which is so strange.”