Everything I Know About Love Quotes
"For me, it was the sound of AOL dial-up internet."
"When I downloaded MSN Messenger, it was like knocking on the wall of a prison cell and hearing someone tap back."
"I always thought my fascination and obsession with the opposite sex would cool down when I left school, but I was just as clueless in my late twenties."
"The father-daughter dance to Van Morrison’s 'Brown Eyed Girl' was brought to an abrupt finish when one of the girls, slightly further along than the rest of us, threw herself belly-first onto the dance floor."
"I never hated anything as much as I hated being a teenager."
"The girl who was sober was riddled with anxieties, convinced everyone she loved was going to die, fretting about what everyone thought of her."
"‘Do you love me anymore?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said."
"The more perfect I strove to be, the more imperfections I noticed."
"I loved him with panic and passion. I didn’t fall in love; love fell on me. Like a ton of bricks from a great height."
"I finally understood that the route to adventure doesn’t just involve late nights and hot bars. Alcohol can also stunt experience."
"Everything will change. The love stays the same, but the format, tone, regularity, and intimacy of friendship will change forever."
"Life grew fuller in the daylight hours and there was less need to escape at night."
"As you get older, it isn't the hangovers that are crippling, but the acute paranoia and dread in the sober hours of the following day."
"To be a writer, I thought I had to be a collector of experiences. And I thought every experience worth having existed only after dark."
"I understood that constantly behaving in a way that makes you feel shameful means you simply will not be able to take yourself seriously."
"One day we will sit in a nursing home, bored out of our minds, and all we will have to make us smile are these memories."
"I've watched it time and time again—a woman always slots into a man's life better than he slots into hers."
"I always saw alcohol as the transportation to experience, but as I went through my twenties I understood it had the same power to stunt experience as it did to exacerbate it."
"You feel like you're going to fall because you're broken into a hundred different floating pieces."
"This overwhelming anxiety had been in the post for a while and it had finally arrived."
"It’s putting other people down so you could feel big."
"I felt my insides photosynthesize with every day I put new habits into practice."
"I sometimes tried to remember a time when my behavior had no consequence."
"She told me it was because I was worried about what she thought of me—and I agreed."
"It’s not a natural thing to sit in a small room with someone removed from the rest of your life and tell them all your raw, uncensored stories."
"She made me think about the part I played in everything."
"Life is shit. It's going to disappoint you. There's nothing you can do to control it."
"But I knew that the longer I spent there, the more things came together."
"The gap between how I felt inside and how I behaved got smaller."
"I learned to sit with problems, to go deeply, uncomfortably internal instead of on a trek to the Outer Hebrides of Experience when things went wrong."
"Life is a difficult, hard, sad, unreasonable, irrational thing. So little of it makes sense. So much of it is unfair."
"Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing. And humans are astounding."
"Being a detective for your past—tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a professional—can be incredibly useful and freeing."
"You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you up until that last slurp of that cup of tea you just put down."
"If you’re feeling wildly overwhelmed with everything, try this: clean your room, answer all your unanswered emails, listen to a podcast, have a bath, go to bed before eleven."
"Swim naked in the sea at every possible opportunity. Go out of your way to do it."
"Things will change more radically than you could ever imagine."
"I know what it’s like to weather a bad experience and then turn it into shared mythology."
"I know what it is to love someone and accept that you can’t change certain things about them."
"More often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself."
"However thin or fat you are is no indicator of the love you deserve or will receive."
"Let your friends abandon you for a relationship once. The good ones will always come back."
"The most exciting bit of a relationship is the first three months."
"Unless someone dies, if a relationship goes wrong, you somehow had a part to play in it."
"Sex isn’t a game of power play—it’s a consensual, respectful, joyful, creative, collaborative experience."
"The perfect man is kind, funny, and generous. He bends down to say hello to dogs and puts up shelves."
"Anyone can be fucking fancied. It is a far greater thing to be loved."
"One of the hardest things about getting older and being in love is knowing when something is 'just reality' and when it’s too much hard work."
"The older you get, the more baggage you carry, the more honest, open, and vulnerable everyone allows themselves to be."
"To choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That’s why it’s called falling—no one meanders-with-a-compass-and-Ordnance-Survey-map into love."
"One of the biggest challenges you face as you get older as a single person is resisting cynicism."