10 Quotes by Dana Schwartz

The only other American is a boy from California whose name and face are equally forgettable, like a contestant on The Bachelorette who’d get eliminated on week two. He.

You don’t cry anymore, but you don’t feel like yourself anymore either. So start again. Start from infancy, get better, and rebuild an identity for yourself.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Agree to everything, change nothing, come back next week and repeat it all over.

The next morning, the entire thing feels like a dream. You never see Bill again, never get his number, never find him on Facebook. In fact, like the end of a lazy ghost story, you never find any evidence of his existence at all.

Despite pledging to play it cool, your flirting instincts are coming out like an X-Men power you haven’t learned to control. You are the Rogue of flirting. If a guy over six feet tall gets within touching distance of you, your body involuntarily begins to flirt. The government wants to put you on a registry.

You get to choose what you want to be. You don’t need skills you were born with or permission. If you want to be an artist or whatever, just work harder than everyone else and become an artist!

She ignores my hilarious joke and continues surveying my room, her fingers playing with the chunky turquoise necklace that sits above her abomination of a coral-colored sweater. She was probably going for “Capable Mom Back in the Workforce!” but the effect is more “Middle-Aged Little Mermaid Cosplayer.

Tinder fills our need for attention, to be seen by someone, to be wanted, and to not quite know what will happen next. It’s a slot machine pass that you always win: Put in a bit of time and a few swipes, crank the lever, and out comes a parade of choices of people who might call you pretty and say they want to buy you a drink.

In that moment, I understood Ophelia more than I had in half a semester of my English teacher’s lectures. Whether the boy you love is mad or pretending to be mad, wanting someone you can’t understand or who won’t let you understand will make you go mad yourself. Waiting for his affection was a version of Chinese water torture, desperately waiting for the next drop of any sign that he might like me, unsure when it would come, if it came at all.