9 Quotes by Joel Derfner

Did you just say youThink Mansfield Park is boring? Get out of my house.

In intimate conversation I am as supportive and positive as the next man, but gatherings of happy people make me miserable. I long to share in the collective joy, but instead I am racked with anxiety.

Next time, involve me in what you’re planning. How had I gone so easily from feeling excluded to doing the excluding? Did I dislike the reminder that I hadn’t always been on the inside looking out? Was I so relieved to be there that I didn’t notice the people who still wanted desperately to be invited in? Had I learned that the only way to be part of a society was to shun its outcasts?

But I could not bear to look into this man’s eyes any longer and see such voracious need, because what if I realized that I was standing in front of a mirror?

I had never before seen somebody I admired understand what was expected of him, choose to act otherwise, and be happier for it. For the first time in my life I realized that it was possible to reinvent oneself.

At the time he seemed both ancient and French, but the wisdom that has come with age tells me he was thirty-two and faking the accent.

People aren’t tidy creations to be stacked neatly in the Tupperware or poured in premeasured quantities from a box into the Cuisinart with no spills; everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess.

For the most part I felt nothing but scorn for an art form that required the pretense that it was natural for people to communicate with one another in rhymed song.

It is easy to see in retrospect that what I longed for was not a boyfriend but a version of me without my defects – a man in whom I could see myself as flawless, a man whose jokes always caused riotous laughter instead of sometimes falling flat, whose German was fluent instead of passable, who actually knew everything instead of pretending to and then Googling it when he got home.