Top 35 David Rakoff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Altruism is innate, but it’s not instinctual. Everybody’s wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.”

— David Rakoff

2. “In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I’m fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.”

— David Rakoff

3. “Central to living a life that is good, is a life that’s forgiving.”

— David Rakoff

4. “I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.”

— David Rakoff

Featured in: Betrayal Quotes

5. “One of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.”

— David Rakoff

6. “People are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let’s all give each other a pass, shall we?”

— David Rakoff

7. “Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.”

— David Rakoff

8. “I do not go outdoors. Not more than I have to. As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.”

— David Rakoff

9. “Almost any age is better than twenty-two.”

— David Rakoff

10. “Just think, the shoes I wouldn’t be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in.”

— David Rakoff

11. “Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.”

— David Rakoff

12. “There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.”

— David Rakoff

13. “You can’t win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say, ‘Why am I not winning this contest as well?’ It’s random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren’t me? Absolutely. I still can’t make that logistic jump to thinking there’s a reason why it shouldn’t be me.”

— David Rakoff

14. “There’s nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking; pessimism is detail-oriented thinking.”

— David Rakoff

15. “Youth is not wasted on the young, it is perpetrated on the young.”

— David Rakoff

16. “The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism.”

— David Rakoff

17. “The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.”

— David Rakoff

18. “Unfortunately, there’s no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it’s not a question I feel really entitled to ask.”

— David Rakoff

19. “What remains of your past if you didn’t allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don’t have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.”

— David Rakoff

20. “Being a stranger was like being dead, and brought to mind how, in a book he had read that most folks misunderstood one common state: The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.”

— David Rakoff

21. “New York is breaking my heart. I’ve often said that it’s like having a really interesting boyfriend suddenly becoming really, really into wine, and having to have endless conversations about it.”

— David Rakoff

22. “I am going to the bad place, as is my wont.”

— David Rakoff

23. “I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky.”

— David Rakoff

24. “Everybody’s got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one’s work; get on with the business of one’s life. That’s the hope, anyway.”

— David Rakoff

25. “I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that’s forgiving.”

— David Rakoff

26. “There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it’s really true: I should have stayed home.”

— David Rakoff

27. “I am neither spontaneous nor ready for anything.”

— David Rakoff

28. “Simplicity, it seems, has always been wasted on those who simply cannot appreciate it.”

— David Rakoff

29. “Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same.”

— David Rakoff

30. “But if one’s dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder.”

— David Rakoff

31. “I had a tumor. But it was great.”

— David Rakoff

32. “But thanks to my rapidly dividing cells, I no longer have that feeling – although I remember it very well – that if I just buckled down to the great work at hand, lived more authentically, stopped procrastinating, cut out sugar, then my best self was just there right around the corner. Yeah, no. I’m done with all that. I.”

— David Rakoff

33. “I have so little control over the act of writing that it’s all I can do to remain conscious.”

— David Rakoff

34. “There will be peaks of great joy from which to crow and vales of tears out of which to climb. When and why they will happen, no one can say, but they will happen. To all of us. We will all go back and forth from one to the other countless times during a lifetime. This is not some call to bipartisanship between inimical sides. The Happy and the Sad are the same population.”

— David Rakoff

35. “Why not be a communist, she thinks, if it means that kind of belonging?”

— David Rakoff

36. “In the right situation, highly formalized, high-suction ass-kissing not only comes all too naturally to me, it makes me breathless with a feeling of penitential power.”

— David Rakoff

37. “We are disclosing animals, wired for unburdening. It’s what we do as a species. When I am being told, I listen, mindful of the honor, remembering all the while that the shore would be mistaken to believe that the waves lap up against him because he is so beautiful.”

— David Rakoff

38. “This brings up yet another, far more important misconception: that being comically generative and having a sense of humor are one and the same thing. The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is among the most. One is a handy social tool, the other an integral component of human survival. It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.”

— David Rakoff