Taffy Brodesser-Akner Quotes

I went back to the bench and lit a cigarette and inhaled, the smoke entering my body and filling it with poison, with something.

That was maybe the the worst insult of adulthood, that even your silly, non-life-threatening, non-base desires got swallowed up by routine and maturity and edged out of your life for good.

He would never be comforted by the adage "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" after that. Because what is the metric of handling something? Not killing yourself?

It's crazy that the friends you're fondest of from your youth sometimes resemble people you would cross the street to avoid as an adult.

Weekends were endless. If you needed to know the most disparate thing about Adam and me it was that he loved them and I did not. I liked order and routine. Weekends were an abyss that was exactly long enough to stare back at me.

By now, we're all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world's metaphors. The zombies are our anxieties. The vampires are our greed. Our fairies are hope. Our werewolves are ... what again? Something

I didn't like the dark matter part. I feel like you can't just decide something must exist because everything's reacting to it. You can't just give it a name and hope it's true."

"But maybe the objects are just behaving in a way we don't understand. Maybe nothing is making them act that way but themselves.

A wife isn't like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She's an entirely new thing. She's something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn't be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger.

What was so much better than stability and the love of a good person who rooted for you? We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is trying to remember that moment? We watch ourselves and our spouses change, and the work is to constantly recall the reasons you did this in the first place.

I wrote mostly about men. I hadn't interviewed a lot of women. Whenever I did, the stories were always about the struggle to be the kind of woman who got interviewed - the writers who were counted out, the politicians who were mistaken for secretaries, the actresses who were told they were too fat and tall and short and skinny and ugly and pretty. It was all the same story, which is not to say it wasn't important. But it was boring. The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul.

The men hadn't had any external troubles. They didn't have a fear that they didn't belong. They hadn't had any obstacles. They were born knowing they belonged, and they were reassured at every turn just in case they'd forgotten. But they were still creative and still people, and so they reached for problems out of an artistic sense of yearning. Their problems weren't real. They had no identity struggle, no illness, no money fears. Instead, they had found the true stuff of their souls - of all our souls - the wound lying beneath all the survivalism and circumstance. pg 233

They became sophisticated in a way that she wasn't-in a way she'd never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.

I never misrepresented myself," he'd say. That was a favorite, as if people weren't supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.

Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you're a lot of kinds of women, you're still always just a woman, which is to say you're always a little bit less than a man.

We aren't meant to comprehend endings. We aren't meant to understand death. Death's whole gig is not being understood.

Like every other woman in the world who has ever been told to calm down, Rachel had no idea how to behave.