Quotes by David Rakoff

“Is there some lesson on how to be friends?I think what it means is that central to livinga life that is good is a life that's forgiving.We're creatures of contact regardless of whetherwe kiss or we...”

“For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are...”

“When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.”

“Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.”

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

“I had a tumor. But it was great.”

“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 t...”

“There will be peaks of great joy from which to crow and vales of tears out of which to climb. When and why they will happen, no one can say, but they will happen. To all of us. We will all go back ...”

“There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.”

“During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost...”

“...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor e...”

“There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, ...”

“Almost any age is better than twenty-two.”

“I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often fr...”

“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 post...”

“It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Tadzio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with ...”

“I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the ...”

“Everyone has an internal age, a time in life when one is, if not one's best, then at very least one's most authentic self. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between 47 a...”

“Deprived of the opportunity to judge one another by the cars we drive, New Yorkers, thrown together daily on mass transit, form silent opinions based on our choices of subway reading. Just by glimp...”

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