“When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.” — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
“...in a certain sense, it's harder for men to say no to sex than it is for women. When a woman says no, nobody's… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
“If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.” — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
“Of course, these women ought to have listened when he told them he wasn't looking for anything serious. But on a certain level, it didn't really matter if it was stupid of them. Ethical people don't take advantage of other people's weakness; that's like being a slumlord or a price gouger. And treading on weakness is exactly what dating felt… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share
“It was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison.” — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
“Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share
“...the belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
“Each time Nate saw her, Elisa’s beauty struck him anew, as if in the interval the memory of what she actually looked like had been distorted by the tortured emotions she elicited since they’d broken up: in his mind, she took on the dimensions of an abject creature. What a shock when she opened the door, bursting with vibrant, almost… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share
“Once she’d remarked, for example, that the problem, even for socialist countries, is that those people who are deeply committed to ideals of any… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
“He would have denied it, even to himself -deemed it a laughable affectation- but it seemed to him now that he had always secretly believed that in the way he lived (he refused to say his "lifestyle"), in his freelance, un-health-insured, sparsely thinged life, he was in a small way registering a rejection-of conformity, of middle-class convention, of not just… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share
“As he tore his eyes from the books to meet hers, he was, as a matter of fact, nearly overwhelmed by sadness. It gusted… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
“Many of those late nights, when he'd paced his apartment, his mind roaming the world he'd painstakingly created and could finally inhabit - moving… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
“He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested… — Adelle Waldman Copy Share Image
