Quotes from David Rakoff

I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving.

I like everything, I replied, feeling misrepresented and only half amused right back. I don't hate the world. I'm scared of it. There's a difference.

one day Satan himself visits, along with his great-grandmother—who is, not surprisingly, a total fucking bitch.

Susan adored her and worshiped her style, / Loved her pronouncements of perfect and vile, / Loved the sheer whim, the madcap willy-nillyness / And how deeply seriously Nonnie took her own silliness

This being a stranger was like being dead, And brought to mind how, in a book he had read That most folks misunderstood one common state: The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.

In the right situation, highly formalized, high-suction ass-kissing not only comes all too naturally to me, it makes me breathless with a feeling of penitential power.

One day reach idealization; after all, it's the journey, not the destination.

Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same.

The hiking boots the outdoor adventure magazine sent me to buy - large, ungainly potato like things that I have been trying to break in for the past four days - cut into my feet and draw blood as if the were lined with cheese graters. I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people. Just think, the shoes I wouldn't be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in.

Rather than making you never want to eat chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You'll eat chicken again, by God, and you'll chew really, really hard.

Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell.

It's all well and good to stay in the institutions you care about, but wouldn't it be nice to feel that the institution, in turn, cared about you, or at least wasn't hell-bent on your eradication or, failing that, the legislating away of your rights?

Is there some lesson on how to be friends? I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact, regardless of whether to kiss or to wound, we still must come together.

To paraphrase Lorne Michaels (my countryman), it's the kind of place where they award Miss Canada to the runner-up, because the prettiest already gets to be prettiest.

It has been a good while since 12:00am held much attraction for me beyond being a perfectly lovely time to be ensconced in the comfort of my own home, sitting in my underpants, contentedly worrying about something.

My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats "Stay up! Stay up!" I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint.

He'd paid all his taxes, so that left … you guessed it.

if psychoanalysis was late-19th-century secular Judaism's way of constructing spiritual meaning in a post-religious world and retail is the late 20th century's way of constructing meaning in a postreligious world, what does it mean that I'm impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday?

Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out.

A half roll of Life Savers fused to the pockets, And in yet another, a lone unwrapped mint Had bundled itself in a stole of gray lint.

The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone.

Even the most charmed life is a veritable travelogue of disappointment.

This sloughing off and scouring down to the walls is about a denial that has little to do with doing without. It is not so much the forging of one's fleshly desires as much as a terrified repudiation of the essential nature of what we are: great sloshing, suppurating bags of wet, prone to rupture. Mortal messes just waiting to happen.

There is no better way to conceal oneself than by listening to others.