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“I don't tell her again she couldn't have stopped it, that it wasn't her fault and that she didn't deserve it. I swallow those words instead. Maybe somewhere deep in my belly, they'll take root and grow.”

“And I started crying, then. Because somebody understood.”

“But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that's all you can do.”

“But back then I thought music was just about music. But music is never about music. If it was, we'd be writing songs about guitars. But we don't.”

“But knowing you're good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that. Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror.”

“I am always so far from free because I am always enslaved to the caprices of my own mind…”

“Sometimes as I lie on the floor in the dark by the phone waiting for his call, I try to figure out what in the hell has gotten into me. Why am i so afraid of not hearing from him? It wouldn’t be so bad… I could figure out how the hell to free myself from this enslavement to men.”

“I’m a stranger wherever I go because I’m strange to myself.”

“I didn’t love him. I’m not sure I even liked him.”

This book is so me

I didn't worry about anything that came next.
Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment, and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber. But also happy.

I stopped worrying. I watched dumb movies and ate chemically laced foods... I drank a Coke and didn't worry about how to recycle the can or about the acid puddling in my belly, acid so powerful it could strip clean a penny. We went to a dumb movie and I didn't worry about the offensive sexism or the lack of minorities in meaningful roles.

Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl.
Men believed she existed--she wasn't just a dreamgirl one in a mil-lion. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren't, then there was something wrong with you.
But it's tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it's tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants.

I waited patiently--years--for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.
But it never happened.

And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they're pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
I would have done anything to feel real again.

We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
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.
And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.