David

“Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact - to keep from becoming cold and callous - and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn't spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again.”
― Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“When I'd begun my last relationship, nearly two decades ago, I'd been unaware of the rule that new lovers must hoard the 'L Word' the way atomic nations hoard their explosives, like something that, once detonated, would change their world forever.”
― Anya Ulinich, Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel: A Graphic Novel

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.”
― Zoë Heller