9 Quotes by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I couldn't bear being this suburban mom who was alternating between screaming at her kids and being the heartfelt, privileged witness to their joy. But the people around us - the haranguing mothers and sexless fathers - I kept trying to find ways that I was better than these people, but all I kept landing on was the fact that the common denominator was me.

He would never marry again. Marriage was for idiots. It was a bygone solution to a property problem he didn’t have. It was a social construct invented by religious people (whose other values he mostly rejected) whose participants lived not past age thirty at the time it was implemented. So, no. He was not going to be falling into that particular trap again. He would have relationships and excitement and he would never put his emotional health into somebody’s hands like that ever again.

I went back to the bench and lit a cigarette and inhaled, the smoke entering my body and filling it with poison, with something.

By now, we're all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world's metaphors. The zombies are our anxieties. The vampires are our greed. Our fairies are hope. Our werewolves are … what again? Something

Maybe it was the insult of childbirth. Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart woman does, the constraints of this world on a woman.

He understood divorce in a macro way, of course. But he had not yet adjusted to it in a micro way, in the other-side-of-the-bed-being-empty way, in the nobody-to-tell-you-were-running-late way, in the you-belong-to-no-one way.

Amicable amicable amicable. Did you ever notice that you only use the word amicable in relation to divorce? Was it because it was so often used for divorce that you didn’t want to poison anything else with it? The way you could say “malignant” for things other than cancer but you never did?

They became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t-in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.

I didn’t like the dark matter part. I feel like you can’t just decide something must exist because everything’s reacting to it. You can’t just give it a name and hope it’s true.” “But maybe the objects are just behaving in a way we don’t understand. Maybe nothing is making them act that way but themselves.