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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: David Rakoff

Everyone has an internal age, a time in life when one is, if not one’s best, then at very least one’s most authentic self. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between 47 and 53 years old.

Life, Time, Best

I’m not sure. But that bless-his/her-heart kind of melancholic humor is among my favorite things in the world. I guess it exposes a kind of humanity – or that’s the hope, at least – a kind of grudging respect for human frailty. Unless it’s actually kicking human frailty while it’s down – I’m not sure.

Hope, Respect, Humanity

…hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV – I hate to say it – none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won’t make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

art, artists, humor, rent, wilde, writers, writing

The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone.

book, humor, travel

There is much in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulant, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration-free, amateur-porn chanteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothing more on its mind than servitude to Mammon and celebrity at any cost, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

humor, paris-hilton, terrorism

A half roll of Life Savers fused to the pockets,And in yet another, a lone unwrapped mintHad bundled itself in a stole of gray lint.

I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun – although I suppose I kind of am – as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I’m just a different kind of fun; the kind that leaves on bereft of hope; the kind of fun that ends in tears.

fun, hopelessness, tears

It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Tadzio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone’s eyes focus upon you. And then shift away.

if psychoanalysis was late-19th-century secular Judaism’s way of constructing spiritual meaning in a post-religious world and retail is the late 20th century’s way of constructing meaning in a postreligious world, what does it mean that I’m impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday?

christmas, freud

I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them.

fear, irony, new-yorker, xenophobia

Almost any age is better than twenty-two.

There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it’s really true: I should have stayed home.