Really Good, Actually Quotes
"The warranty on history’s worst sofa had outlasted our marriage."
"Neither of us had an answer, which seemed an answer itself."
"I wanted to tap that version of myself on the shoulder: honey, if you’re embarrassed now . . ."
"The first morning without him, I swear to god I woke up crying."
"Every item in the house was dripping with significance."
"It was so easy to move through the world as a pair—splitting the cost of things and sharing big sweaters and having someone to stand in line with at the bank."
"It is horrible to be sad in the summer."
"That first month alone passed in a haze."
"I don’t know how you aren’t constantly having a breakdown."
"Shame this had to happen right as I lost my last shred of youthful beauty."
"I felt pleasantly disconnected from everything around me, as though observing life underwater."
"Maybe it was all worth it, the disappointment and heartbreak."
"Maybe I was sublime right now, walking in the moonlight of my glorious, complicated selfhood."
"Toronto is too small a city to get divorced in, really."
"After a few months of lying prone in my bed, I wanted to get out there and lie prone somewhere else."
"It felt humiliating to admit it, but without a partner to dissect things with, the big and small events of life seemed flimsy."
"I had accepted that it was over, that it would never be how it was again, even, possibly, that it was for the best, but I would have paid a million dollars for one more cab ride home from a party, drunkenly touching each other’s legs and poring over the night’s events."
"I felt too old to move on and too young to be divorced, like I’d stranded myself in the gap between experience and maturity."
"One day you will wake up and feel good. It won’t last long, but then you’ll have another day where you barely remember this abjection, and another, and another, until that’s just your life. But for now, it will be hard. This is the part that’s hard."
"Noticing this made me feel like I was living in one of those sitcoms where characters are always saying, 'It’s the nineties!'"
"Old guys are so clingy. With young people, they like you or you never hear from them again."
"Meeting new people felt like starting over: daunting and depressing, a challenge for someone fallen on romantic hard times."
"I was fucking lovable, actually. I was fine."
"When I get home, I will burn incense and read a book, and my phone will be in another room and I won’t even remember which one, because I am so unbothered to be away from it."
"That loving and supporting someone for many years was not the same as eating pizza with them for two hours in a bar full of pinball machines did not really register."
"The only activity that has ever really interested me is sitting around with my friends in flattering lighting, eating food and talking about who wanted to kiss us, and what we were wearing when they did."
"Continuing to live in the mausoleum of your old relationship was maybe not the healthiest option."
"Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end . . . that is the basic message."
"‘Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.’"
"Last New Year’s Eve Jon and I had a massive fight, the cause of which I could not remember."
"I think you can’t force it. Like you find love when you least expect it, right, so if you’re dating too much, and you’re trying trying trying, that’s gonna take too much out of you."
"That’s okay. It takes as long as it takes."
"The mornings were so dark it was almost impossible to get out of bed."
"I knew I was not supposed to be interested in this kind of thing, that it was possibly unfeminist and definitely unhealthy, but I couldn’t stop myself."
"It seemed impossible that I was supposed to keep loving—even revering—my body as it decomposed in slow motion."
"Every human element of the air travel experience has been taken away, and you have to buy back each individual thing."
"It feels so good to have your aunts and uncles act like you’re a real human being, to file joint taxes, to tell some rude landlord that my husband and I are looking for some extra office space . . . like, yes, you’re buying into the heteropatriarchal state apparatus or whatever, but everybody gives you money and you get to sit at the grown-ups’ table and own a fancy blender."
"I had flashes, sometimes: the two of us laughing over coffee, singing along to the radio in a rental car, frantically gripping each other’s hand under the table at a dinner party where someone was saying something idiotic; an afternoon doing the crossword in bed; a running joke that he might one day piss on me in the shower; the feeling of walking home from work, knowing he and the cat would be there."
"The idea of facing it all—the ceremony, the slow dancing, the small talk—without a sarcastic hand to hold was simply too bleak to entertain."
"I am a murmuration, a lightly undulating spray of particles, moving easily around the earth without impacting it."
"Getting divorced was like getting stuck in a blouse at Zara."
"Nothing is impossible. The word itself says, ‘I’m possible’!" - Audrey Hepburn
"This urge to throw your phone off a bridge..."
"Think about what you love about moving your body."
"We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery."
"I think your thirties are honestly the perfect age. Like in a way being thirty-one is exactly like being twenty-six, except you’re smarter and hotter and you know a bit about tiles."
"The dress was beautiful, let’s be honest here, whatever else happened around that event, the dress was f***ing gorgeous."
"You’re someone I promise to love forever."
"women in their thirties own things that are framed."
"Stuff was happening, and I was glad to be there for it."