Cult Classic Quotes
"I fantasize about other people's fantasies, about cars that arrive earlier than expected, sweeping me off to some glamorous event."
"That’s not a story about cigarettes, it’s a story about Ambien."
"It’s a story about the confluence of desire."
"We were shipwrecked from newsstands, kept alive by doctors’ offices that allowed us to claim a staggering 17.5 pairs of eyes per copy."
"Print ads are like 'tossing wet pasta down a well.'"
"Every goodbye is a little mourning just as every orgasm is a little death."
"Life is not lived in politics, it’s lived in days."
"The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off."
"There’s something newborn about the way he moved through it."
"Listen, this may be weird, but now that you’re in front of me, I just wanted to say sorry I was so shitty to you."
"The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious."
"No one has the power to control how an ex blooms in one’s partner’s imagination."
"Everything gets stuck in the craw of the consciousness with you."
"You’re the one who’s been glued to the floor of this place."
"It’s not sneaking," Vadis said. "Watch this."
"And yet!" he shouted. "Because you were told something is afoot, you can feel the city turning its many eyes to the same subject."
"We have to stop thinking of it as mind control."
"Do you remember the first wedding you ever went to?"
"You can’t base your life on fear and guilt. You gotta do what you gotta do because you can’t do it twice."
"I’ll miss you, too. You’re my favorite thing."
"The cat and I sat on the bed, our eyes wide."
"I did not take it for granted that such a person was living in my house."
"You, too, are also the thing that is my favorite."
"People want money so they feel in control, and they want to feel in control so they feel happy."
"But focusing on trends that we had no part in creating or even spotting had a bottom-feeder effect."
"Every second of our lives is pressed from two sides—the present and the past—like coal."
"I could hear cars honking their way into the Holland Tunnel."
"What good was my heart doing anyone, in any sense?"
"It was as if all the feelings I’d ever had about our relationship drove off on the M22 with him."
"That was the secret, to put your denial mask on first before helping others."
"He’d barely looked at me but now he did, setting down his pencil."
"The idea that we had plucked each other off a shelf and could just return each other with no consequences was distracting."
"Men, even boys, are very good at knowing when a woman’s heart has left the building."
"He was talking into his phone. He looked as if he was in a hurry."
"The walls inside the equipment shack were covered in cheap panels."
"Our relationship died for the same reason Jonathan’s senior thesis got ripped to shreds: It smothered itself in its own conceptions."
"Sometimes it was the heart; often it was only the cellophane."
"Who could understand me now? Recently revived coma patients, that’s who."
"It was fine, seeing Howard and Cooper, just fine."
"I found it a challenge to experience emotions in the moment and hold on to them at the same time."
"I was starting to feel like a human Etch-A-Sketch."
"I wondered what it was I was supposed to get from Oscar now that I didn’t get from dating him then."
"Let the man sleep with his crystal pumpkins, I thought."
"The idea of then jumping straight into another uneven hole, one in which I strung Jonathan up from the ceiling and beat him with a paddle, was too daunting."
"I found myself doing things like blowing into my already-gloved fingers, announcing that it was cold."
"I did not expect it to. But I was suddenly responsible for this creature who noticed I wasn’t reacting how women reacted in the movies."
"I wondered if he remembered that night as well as I did."
"There is a membrane of pride that surrounds the heart and I found that when that area got damaged, it was hard to figure out what took the hit."
"The only remnant of Howard in my possession was a postcard he’d once given me for his sister’s art show."
"What becomes of a person like that, a social heretic who can’t even keep a ring on her finger?"
"Most mistakes get made slowly, almost imperceptibly, over time."
"It’s unfortunate, how some of the world’s most productive conversations are breakup conversations."
"I'm an asshole and I just really love you. I'm sorry."
"We all die facing in a final direction, even if we are confined to beds."
"Turns out that, despite all that glorious free labor, cults are a bad business model. In the traditional sense."