Wren

“Because the end of a friendship isn’t even formally acknowledged—no Little Talk, no papers served—you walk around effectively heartbroken but embarrassed to admit it, even to yourself. It’s a special, open-ended kind of pain, like having a disease that doesn’t even have a name. You worry you must be pathetically oversensitive to feel so wounded over such a thing. You can’t tell people, “My friend broke up with me,” without sounding like a nine-year-old. The only phrase I can think of that even recognizes this kind of hurt—“You look like you just lost your best friend”—is only ever spoken by adults to children. You can give yourself the same ineffectual lecture your parents used to give you as a kid: anyone who’d treat you this way isn’t a very good friend and doesn’t deserve your friendship anyway. But the nine-year-old in you knows that the reason they’ve ditched you is that you suck.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons

“Of course no one is the Right Person when you meet her; this is just an illusion necessary to lure you into investing the years and making the sacrifices necessary to love someone. It's like telling yourself your book is going to be a masterpiece and make you rich in order to undertake the laborious ordeal of writing it. It's only after making all those compromises and forfeitures, and amassing a shared fortune in memories, regrets, in-jokes and secrets, fights and reconciliations, that that person becomes the only possible one for you, unique and irreplaceable.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“My father could have been a great comedian but he didn't believe that that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe jog as an accountant and when I was 12 years old he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that: You can fail at what you don't want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”
― Jim Carrey

“Obviously, some part of us loves feeling 1) right and 2) wronged. But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it's even more insidious than most vices because we don't even consciously acknowledge it's a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it's a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive masturbation.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing