Ryan O'Connell Quotes

Sometimes the worst kind of love teaches you the best lessons.

I was starting to understand that nothing in this life is owed to me and that it's quite possible to sabotage yourself if you don't pay attention.

Getting angry at the world for your problems isn't going to bring you any closer to a dream job or relationship or whatever else you feel like you deserve. It's going to keep you thousands of miles away from it.

Transitioning to adulthood is hard enough. Having your friends judge your progress doesn't make it any easier.

But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you're not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are.

Because only when you discover that you know nothing can you really start to learn something.

College is about figuring out who you are, and in order to do that, you need to become a lot of people you aren't.

You will fall in love with your friends. Deep, passionate love. You will create a second family with them, a kind of tribe that makes you feel less vulnerable. Sometimes our families can't love us all the time. Sometimes we're born into families who don't know how to love us properly. They do as much as they can but the rest is up to our friends. They can love you all the time, without judgement. At least the good ones can.

We've created a dating culture in which we never say what we really feel.

It's taboo to admit that you're lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven't left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you're not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are.

A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn't transition well to adult life, that you'd fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. La di da, it's happening.

Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you like you're some prized jewel and they tell you over and over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole life ahead of you. "Getting old ain't for sissies," your father tells you wearily.

You wish they'd stop saying these things to you because all it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind you of how much you're not taking advantage of your youth.

You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger's bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constan

You'll always care about your first love. That doesn't make you crazy, it just makes you human. When relationships end, it's not so cut and dry. You carry everyone you've ever loved into every relationship thereafter.

I fall in love with ideas and fantasies rather than whole beings and then I sit here and wonder why I'm still alone. It's because I don't fucking pay attention. I'm too busy thinking about tomorrow that today falls through the cracks.

How To Tell If Somebody Loves You:
Somebody loves you if they pick an eyelash off of your face or wet a napkin and apply it to your dirty skin. You didn't ask for these things, but this person went ahead and did it anyway. They don't want to see you looking like a fool with eyelashes and crumbs on your face. They notice these things. They really look at you and are the first to notice if something is amiss with your beautiful visage!

Somebody loves you if they assume the role of caretaker when you're sick. Unsure if someone really gives a shit about you? Fake a case of food poisoning and text them being like, "Oh, my God, so sick. Need water." Depending on their response, you'll know whether or not they REALLY love you. "That's terrible. Feel better!" earns you a stay in friendship jail; "Do you need anything? I can come over and bring you get well remedies!" gets you a cozy friendship suite. It's easy to care about someone when they don't need you. It's easy to love them when they're healthy and don't ask you for anything beyond change for the parking meter. Being sick is different. Being sick means asking someone to hold your hair back when you vomit. Either love me with vomit in my hair or don't love me at all.

Somebody loves you if they call you out on your bullshit. They're not passive, they don't just let you get away with murder. They know you well enough and care about you enough to ask you to chill out, to bust your balls, to tell you to st

In your twenties, you expect to accumulate a graveyard's worth of failed romances. But what you don't count on is having to bury so many treasured friendships alongside them.

We live in an age where we feel guilt whenever we have to cut someone off but the reality is that some relationships do need to die, some people do need to be unfollowed and defriended. We aren't meant to be this tethered to the people in our past. The Internet mandates that we don't burn bridges and keep everyone around like relics but those expectations are unrealistic and unhealthy. Simply put, we don't need to know what everyone else is up to. We're allowed to be choosy about who we surround ourselves with online and in real life, even if it might hurt people's feelings.

That was an important thing for me to realize. It's perhaps the best lesson I could have ever taught myself. Getting it would eventually be the one thing that released me from my neuroses and let me be truly happy.
I'm not special.

I love watching someone put on a show, only to slowly settle into the person they really are.

I wasn't thinking clearly. You never are after a breakup. You have to pretend that everything is fine when secretly you're dying a thousand deaths a minute.

My generation is the first to be in charge of their image. We call the shots and tell you how to feel about our lives. It doesn't matter if what we are projecting is phony. If someone believes it, that makes it true.

You will fall in love with someone for one night and one night only. They'll come to you when you need them and be gone in the morning when you don't. At first, this will make you feel empty and you'll try to convince yourself that you could've loved this person for longer than a night, but you can't. Some people are just meant to make cameo appearances, some are destined to be a pithy footnote. That's okay though. Not every person we love has to stick around. Sometimes it's better to leave while you're still ahead. Sometimes it's better to leave before you get unloved.

I don't want to have to be the one who mourns everything when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It's mortifying. It's mortifying to be the one who remembers.

Lies can boost your confidence, they can get you accepted by a group of friends..., but anything that's not the truth is going to fade.

Most people who have achieved a modicum of success right after they graduated did it by being brave and laughing at anyone who told them no.