Teddy Wayne > Quotes

“It’s super-important to have a strong social media presence, and Jane’s always going, When interviewers ask you about your Twitter, say you love reaching out directly to your fans, and I’m like, I don’t even know how to use Twitter or what the password is because you disabled my laptop’s wireless and only let me go on the Internet to do homework research or email Nadine assignments, and she says, I’m doing you a big favor, it’s for nobodies who want to pretend like they’re famous and for self-promoting hacks without PR machines, and adults act like teenagers passing notes and everyone’s IQ drops thirty points on it.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“Remember this, I commanded myself again, though I knew that this memory--like all of them--would lose an essential and truthful quality over the years. The notion that we repress or redact significant chunks of the past strikes me as a dramatic contrivence for storytellers more than a realistic psychological phenonomen, but that we alter or retrospection in subtle ways, to airbrush out unpalatable flemishes here and there, much as we sweep detritus in our present consciousness under the carpet: that seems quite natural.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Sometimes the only way to start over in life is to burn down the house.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Sometimes I wonder if, having the ability to time travel back to certain moments in which our fear or impulsiveness got the best of us and resulted in an unsatisfying outcome, we would actually alter our behavior knowing what we know now, or if we would end up repeating exactly what we did the first time, surrendering to those elemental directives, incapable of deviating from some preordained essence of our character.”
― Teddy Wayne, Loner

“There were no people or cars out; if not for the houses around me, I could have been in a forest. Something about the moment--likely my adolescent conviction that my pain had more beauty, more holiness, than the average person's, that it was exceptional and exquisite--compelled me to tell myself to memorialize it. I suppose it is this kind of egotistical delusion that drives some people to make art.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“I’m an extroverted introvert at best. But everyone says that, right? They want to claim the best parts of each—that they can be charming when they need to, but they really prefer solitude. No one’s ever, like, ‘I have the neediness of an extrovert and the poor social skills of the introvert.’ Sorry”
― Teddy Wayne, Loner

“Should previous decades be defined by an article of clothing and an intoxicant—a gray flannel suit and a martini, tie-dye and marijuana, bell-bottoms and hallucinogens, shoulder pads and cocaine—the mid-nineties were relaxed-fit Gap jeans and light beer. An”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Their signal advantage is being well fed. Yours is hunger.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Order belongs to the wealthy," he said, and we both laughed because that was all we could afford to do.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“HE WHO LAUGHS LAST LAUGHS BEST”
― Teddy Wayne

“--her hand grazed the center of my back, testing to see if I was awake; the tentative gesture of someone in a foreign stranger's room, in the middle of the night...at an inflection point that could conceivably determine whether two people might someday get married or never see each other again, both of us lonely and longing for shelter.
I pretended to be asleep.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“All hopes I had of a roommate who would help upgrade me to a higher social stratum snagged on the gleaming barnacles of Steven's orthodontia.”
― Teddy Wayne, Loner

“How dispensable are most people in our lives, collections of matter filling empty space until they’re recycled.”
― Teddy Wayne, Loner

“Until that point, I'd assumed that nearly everyone bore a certain amount of loneliness within them, it was just the human condition of being trapped inside one mind and body for a lifetime, so that whatever isolation I felt was normal and universal; but hearing Seger's lyrics, rather than identifying with someone else's expression of similar feelings, as art was supposed to do for its audience, I thought that there was a different quality to mine, it was singular and peculiar and grotesque, a lonely flavor of loneliness--but maybe, I also reasoned, that's what true loneliness was, its Tolstoyan uniqueness made it so, and the only way out was to define yours to someone else and hope they still accepted you, and the only lonelier fate than rejection was never exposing yourself to its possibility.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“...this was all we collectively had, we knew no protest songs, had little to protest--and I felt a swelling in my chest, a surge of joy flowering out through my limbs; there is nothing like crooning in a group to a chorus to communicate to yourselves and the world that you are young and drunk and unhindered by responsibility, that the future stretches out endlessly before you like a California highway.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“skeuomorph,”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Sometimes the guys who look the most normal are the biggest pervs of all.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“people with far more to lose than gain in any revolution,”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“the very point of higher education was to disturb their minds, to force them to reevaluate the notions they’d unquestioningly carried for eighteen years.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“You were the whole reason I was taking the class—and dating your roommate—but we might as well have been at different schools.”
― Teddy Wayne, Loner

“eager to secure health insurance at the expense of daylight.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“the constant victim in her own mind of her absent, apathetic father and monstrously narcissistic mother.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Winner

“The accrual of the piddling insults of aging, each month a new minor complaint to track.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Everyone thinks they're a fraud," he said. "Except for the actual frauds.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“They see that as physical communities break down and trust in institutions corrodes, people are looking for order and meaning, to be told what to think by authority figures. They want to be literal ‘followers,’ as if they’re members of a religion. Or, worse, in a cult. And the cult leaders, like your roommate, are happy to be the dictators of their own little kingdoms, seizing the power that accrues more than ever to certain individuals, bullying people into thinking like them, even though that’s inimical to the notion of what writing and reading are supposed to be about, which is to explore a subject with humility and encourage your reader to ask further questions.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“group dinners were the one time these rapacious capitalists embraced socialism.)”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“There could be a hostility to gregariousness, a refusal to permit others their antisocial tendencies.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“When you’re acting angry, it’s hard to also be scared.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“it’s not about getting everything you want, but being satisfied with what you do have.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Winner

“Now he required some contemporaneous tether to the outside, a feeling of being plugged in to information that was dynamically changing by the second, not a book that had been typeset decades ago.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory