20 Quotes by Emily Gould

Amy had always thought she was too vain and selfish to seriously contemplate suicide, also too afraid of pain. She realized now that when she'd thought that, she hadn't understood how painful existence could get. It could get so painful, it turned out, that any other kind of pain began to seem preferable. She felt ridiculous thinking these goth-teenager thoughts, but they were real.

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

For her part, Amy Kev's Waffles with a passionate ferocity that she felt a little bit guilty about not being able to feel, most of the time, for humans. It probably helped that he was constantly doing cute shit and couldn't speak.

Free-floating ambition is toxic because it means that anyone who has accomplished anything in any realm of human endeavor is the enemy because she might be your competition. So you hate everyone a little bit, but behind this wall of hatred you still feel vulnerable. And you are vulnerable, but not because of the competition. You're vulnerable because if anyone points you in anything that seems like a direction, that's where you'll go.

Existential angst was far, far above her pay grade.

No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter.

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people’s interiority.

Women especially are trained to protect other people’s feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life.