Quotes from Matthew Norman

There's that first few seconds, right when you wake up in the morning, when your head is absolutely clear. It's like a computer booting up—its screen perfectly clean and white—before the train wreck of your desktop clogs everything up with its disorganized jumble of crap.

No," I say. "Actually, the first time I saw one in real life, I thought of the Great Pit of Carkoon in Return of the Jedi." "OK, well, I officially take back my previous comment about you knowing a thing or two about vaginas." "Understandable." "What

Free Fallin' " by Tom Petty came on, so he turned it up, because everything's simpler when Tom Petty's on the radio. We're all just good girls who love our mamas, horses, and America, too, goddammit.

Tell her that I miss her. And that I'm sorry. You don't even know what you're sorry for. Well, yeah, but that doesn't matter. At this point, I'll be sorry for whatever she wants me to be sorry for.

Significant thins shouldn't begin or end at Applebee's.

In their divorces—maybe in every divorce in the history of divorces—there was a moment when things could've gone either way. "Maybe this will save us before we need saving," she said.

Significant things shouldn't begin or end at Applebee's.

I attempt to throw the empty can at the squirrels, but it turns out empty beer cans don't travel very far when heaved across yards by chronically unathletic men in their early thirties. "Are

Never trust someone who isn't miserable at least half the time. That's my motto.

I'm a smeller of books and a marker-upper of books.

In all our family portraits growing up, I looked like a short, half-Jewish kid being held captive by a family of Vikings. "So

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a snob. I don't have a problem with Applebee's per se. But I think we can all agree, as a civilized society, that lives shouldn't change there. Significant

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a snob. I don't have a problem with Applebee's per se. But I think we can all agree, as a civilized society, that lives shouldn't change there.

After the age of about . . . what, sixteen? We're all damaged. Every single beautiful, stupid, precious one of us. Damaged, damaged, damaged.

Why would some decent guy our age wanna talk to me? He can go on his phone and find a hundred versions of me the way I looked fifteen years ago.

it doesn't feel like home—more like a strange, wildly expensive sleepaway camp for pseudoadults.

That's me giving myself a tough-love speech. I'm going to start doing that more often, I've decided. One might as well put his inner monologue to good use.

mothers are really just emotional hostages.

Are all our parents, collectively, fucked up? Have they always been fucked up, and it just takes us until our own adulthood to figure that out?

It's a cruel fact that if your wife cheats on you, the guy will have a name like Tyler. Something cool—something your parents never would have had the guts to name you. The

Mixed in with all of its silly bullshit, Facebook is the literal manifestation of all our regrets, looping and looping, for free, on our computers and phones. People who should be gone and safely out of our lives forever are there again, one cryptic little glimpse at a time, reminding us of all the things we should or shouldn't have done.

Sometimes people throw things away. That doesn't mean those things aren't really, really good. Most of the time, it just means that person didn't know what they had.

Like most men who are not Brad Pitt, I could do without the sight of my own nudity.

Fox News isn't something you can tune out, like a game show or a cable movie you've seen a dozen times. The colors, the moving logos, the giant fonts, the . . . well . . . the things they actually say. It's like the television equivalent of one of those cymbal-banging monkey toys being duct-taped to your forehead.