Emily Gould > Quotes

“I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he’d liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn’t the pure ethical person she’d perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her.

Keith said, “It’s like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice.”

I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. “It’s a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT’S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!”

I tried to explain what I meant.

I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn’t know what their true sexuality was like, because they’d been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don’t tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of their faults, unless their faults are cute little hole-in-the-stocking faults. Whereas women, heterosexual women, are capable of finding being ignored, being alternately worshiped and insulted, not to mention male pattern baldness, not just tolerable but erotic.”
― Emily Gould

“Existential angst was far, far above her pay grade.”
― Emily Gould, Friendship

“Amy had always thought she was too vain and selfish to seriously contemplate suicide, also too afraid of pain. She realized now that when she'd thought that, she hadn't understood how painful existence could get. It could get so painful, it turned out, that any other kind of pain began to seem preferable. She felt ridiculous thinking these goth-teenager thoughts, but they were real.”
― Emily Gould, Friendship

“As a child I was a little bit disgusted and embarrassed to learn about the facts of life, and did not immediately connect the idea of “sex” to the feelings I got when I lay on the carpet on my stomach,idly humping a stuffed animal while watching Sesame Street. The realization that sex could be something to anticipate happily rather than to dread as another unpleasant grown-up duty came to me in a dream. Nothing overtly sexual even happened in this dream—it was a dream about lying in bed on a sunny afternoon with sun streaking the sheets, surrounded by warmth, feeling satisfied. It took life a long time for life to catch up with what this idealized version of sex could be like; it’s still not like that every time, but when it is, I notice.”
― Emily Gould, And the Heart Says Whatever

“But she was too scared, or too busy, or too distracted, or just too tired, to do what was necessary to make her dreams come true.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“Maybe she had assumed that what she and Sam had was veering in a permanent direction because they were at an age when people got married. She thought suddenly of how often during their relationship they'd found themselves surrounded by other couples, functioning as a unit and finding that it was easier to do so. Because couples were what society wanted, what it was built for. But maybe they hadn't simply been moving toward anything, maybe they had simply been coasting on inertia.”
― Emily Gould, Friendship

“She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.”
― Emily Gould, Friendship

“She both did and didn’t want to tell Amanda about Dylan. It was still thrilling to tell other people about him; talking about him conjured him and made it almost like he was there. In some ways it was better than actually being around him.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“Callie didn’t laugh. Her brow creased, and despite her perfect makeup, she looked older. “There’s no evolution for guys like him. You can be with them, but the version of him you’re seeing right now is who you’re going to be with. If you’re okay with that, by all means.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“Tom turned and looked up just in time to make eye contact with Marie, who was still across the street. She waved and gave him an eyebrow raise to indicate that she understood what had just gone down. He raised a fingertip to his lips. He thought he was so cool, but he also sort of was cool. She crossed the street to meet him, and he greeted her by holding out his hand, which was almost as good as a kiss. Inside his hand was a little plastic bag full of brown twigs. “Want to come over and eat mushrooms?” Obviously, she said yes.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“She got faster at making change, and her muscles learned the wrist-flick that eased credit cards through the slot in the machine on the first try, the exact pace to walk at so that the tray of drinks in her hand would sail and not wobble or slosh.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“Relax, Amy, I'm not gay. I just like Sleater-Kinney. It's possible to like them and be heterosexual. It's not like I invited you to go see Tegan and Sara.”
― Emily Gould, Friendship

“To childless people, children were a logistical problem to be solved: find a way to pay for and arrange childcare, and you were free. They didn’t understand that even when you weren’t with your child, the child continued to exist in a part of your brain that you had to consciously work to silence, or as a low hum of anxiety that colored everything. Either way, you were fucked. Either way, pleasure and creativity were sacrificed entirely, or only permitted in small doses.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“The feeling that Laura got as she watched Callie play her songs was so strange, a mix of pain and pleasure. Or maybe it was more like the kind of minor pain you can easily stand to inflict on yourself but that’s intolerable when someone else does it.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“But then they hung out with her a little bit and talked about sleep and viruses and the impossibility of getting men to proactively plan to accommodate other people’s needs. Eventually, they always came around to the idea that Laura really was a mom, even though she could, in the right lighting, still pass for a member of the enemy class: unfettered women.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“We would talk about the future while holding it forcibly at bay with our inactivity.”
― Emily Gould, And the Heart Says Whatever

“For her part, Amy Kev's Waffles with a passionate ferocity that she felt a little bit guilty about not being able to feel, most of the time, for humans. It probably helped that he was constantly doing cute shit and couldn't speak.”
― Emily Gould, Friendship

“In that song, someone suggests to the narrator (ostensibly Joni) that she should settle down and have children or do charity work, and Joni responds that the cure for her melancholy is actually to find herself “another lover.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“Her hand brushed his accidentally, and he reached out and grabbed it, which made Laura feel a stunning burst of happiness.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“Was she supposed to explain how it had felt to sing onstage, that it was like one of her limbs had been severed and then reattached and now blood was flowing through it again?”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“She’d been told often enough that she looked sad, even when she wasn’t. Catcallers had always tended to yell ‘Smile!’; there was just something gloomy about the downturn of her mouth and the size of her eyes.”
― Emily Gould, Friendship

“Free-floating ambition is toxic because it means that anyone who has accomplished anything in any realm of human endeavor is the enemy because she might be your competition. So you hate everyone a little bit, but behind this wall of hatred you still feel vulnerable. And you are vulnerable, but not because of the competition. You're vulnerable because if anyone points you in anything that seems like a direction, that's where you'll go.”
― Emily Gould, And the Heart Says Whatever

“There’s no evolution for guys like him. You can be with them, but the version of him you’re seeing right now is who you’re going to be with. If you’re okay with that, by all means.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“They were staying in a group house that often hosted touring musicians, which Laura had expected to be gross but turned out to be less gross than her own apartment. It benefited a lot from having high ceilings and the vaguely healthy ambiance created wherever you see a lot of bikes.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“And there was Sam’s charming Marxist thing of thinking that restaurants, new clothes, et cetera, were frivolities that only served to keep workers addicted and enslaved by Capital. Amy agreed with him about this, in theory, but she loved wearing a new outfit for the first time, ideally to a restaurant.”
― Emily Gould, Friendship