One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It’s not like if you’re in Los Angeles, where everyone’s so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you’re down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you’re depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong.
Who is the beauty icon that inspires you the most? Is it Sophia Loren? Audrey Hepburn? Halle Berry? Mine is Nosferatu, because that vampire taught me my number-one and number-two favorite beauty tricks of all time: avoid the sun at all costs and always try to appear shrouded in shadows.
What’s so wrong with effort, anyway? It means you care.
I am the kind of person who, if my feelings are unrequited, can completely detach from someone emotionally if I simply put my mind to it.
The great thing about true best friends is that when you go MIA for a few months, they inquire but they don’t press. Best friends know the power of infatuation but also how quickly it dissipates. You just have to wait it out. And then afterward, tease them about it for decades.
Playful arguments would become fits of uncontrollable laughter, and, like magic, that experience would be crystallized into a private joke, and the private joke would get boiled down to a simple phrase, which became a souvenir of the entire experience. For years to come, the phrase alone could uncork hours of renewed laughter. And as everyone knows, the best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.
Asking your friend to be a bridesmaid is one of the modern paradoxes: no one actually wants to do it, but everyone would be offended if you didn’t ask.
You know when you meet someone so smart and cool that all their tastes and opinions seem like the correct ones? And you instantly think: those are my opinions now too!
I can’t for the life of me not eat something that I want to eat.
People don’t say “Give me your honest opinion” because they want an honest opinion. They say it because it’s rude to say “Please tell me I’m amazing.
In high school, I had fun in my academic clubs, watching movies with my girlfriends, learning Latin, having long, protracted, unrequited crushes on older guys who didn’t know me, and yes, hanging out with my family. I liked hanging out with my family! Later, when you’re grown up, you realize you never get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that’s it.
With my friends, the sad truth is that our best “best friend” days are behind us. In college, we used to be able to meet each other in the common area of our off-campus housing, excited about our evening ahead, which consisted of someone making an enormous tureen of pasta and drinking wine from a box while we took turns regaling each other with details of our terrible love lives.
There are not many relationships more powerful than that of two women who fall fast and deep into a friendship. It was heartbreaking to be loved and left.
Sometimes a story just needs an ending, and I used to not be a creative enough person to think of an ending to a romantic story that isn’t a wedding or a death. This story didn’t end in fireworks, because the truth is, fireworks are something from my twenties. I could have made fireworks, but I chose to make a nuanced memory of a person who is neither a hero nor a villain in my life. All I had to do now was move on.
Soul mates” is what you aim for, but soup snakes is what you get sometimes.
Throwing a tantrum feels good because you think you are ruining everyone’s good time when you feel your very worst. But the truth is, you’re not ruining their good time, you’re just giving them another good story.
Once I saw Paris Hilton leaving a restaurant in Hollywood and the paparazzi cameras were all over her. It looked so unpleasant. It wasn’t because she didn’t look sensational – she was that perfect combination of fashionable and slutty – it was because the paparazzi guys were shouting these insanely rude and intrusive questions at her. Like, asking her who she was sleeping with and stuff. I was kind of interested in the answer, so I was glad they asked, but it was still gross.
The result of my not caring so much about what I say allows me to care more about how I say it.
It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound.
Married people, it’s up to you. It’s entirely on your shoulders to keep this sinking institution afloat. It’s a stately old ship, and a lot of people, like me, want to get on board. Please be psyched, and convey that psychedness to us. And always remember: so many, many people are envious of what you have. You’re the star at the end of the Shakespearean play, wearing the wreath of flowers in your hair. The rest of us are just the little side characters.