Top 35 Kristen Roupenian Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What a fantastical place adulthood has turned out to be: with the power of social media and a thousand dollars, she’s summoned Taylor’s dream crush out of an ancient VHS tape and brought him here, to life.”

— Kristen Roupenian

2. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, he tries to tell them. I just wanted to be seen, and loved for who I am. The problem was, it was all a misunderstanding. I pretended to be a good person, and then I couldn’t stop.”

— Kristen Roupenian

3. “Ted kisses Rachel with tongue and squeezes her ass. In doing so, he discovers that it is possible to enjoy something and yet not care about it in the slightest. He finds this sensation – feeling pleasure, and simultaneously feeling detached from the pleasure – to be, itself, quite pleasurable. He wonders if he has miraculously become a Buddhist, or suffered a psychotic break.”

— Kristen Roupenian

4. “Ted would have preferred not to live like this, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.”

— Kristen Roupenian

5. “She can feel it scratching at her, her anger, wedged in the space where the two halves of her rib cage meet.”

— Kristen Roupenian

6. “Did he even exist in her mind, as a living, breathing, thinking person? He spent so much time trying to figure out what she was thinking, but what kind of a consciousness did she imagine lived behind the mask of his face?”

— Kristen Roupenian

7. “And it would have been one thing, all of these suitors agreed, to have been rejected for a reason, but to be passed over simply because one was, in some vague way, not good enough – that was an unequivocal blow.”

— Kristen Roupenian

8. “Frankly, the whole concept was a little too New Age – y for me.”

— Kristen Roupenian

9. “Was there a point at which your ego was crushed so completely that it died, and you no longer had to lug around the burden of yourself?”

— Kristen Roupenian

10. “If I describe him to you in terms of hair, eye color, shape of face, the effect will be all wrong, because he was the living, breathing incarnation of my deepest desires, not yours. You must imagine your own naked man, and I will tell you only this: he was larger than I would have expected, more fully embodied, and that is only half a dirty joke. There was no prettiness about him, and nothing effeminate. Nothing angelic, either, so if that’s what you had started to picture, start again.”

— Kristen Roupenian

11. “And she did think Robert was cute. Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class.”

— Kristen Roupenian

12. “All I’ve ever wanted is to be loved. Well, to be worshiped. To be desired, madly and painfully, to the exclusion of all else. Is that so wrong?”

— Kristen Roupenian

13. “But I guess that was the whole problem, at that point, my inability to deal with normal human interaction.”

— Kristen Roupenian

14. “Her memory like a skipping record, bumping continually up against the scratch.”

— Kristen Roupenian

15. “The way he looked at her? Imagine somebody looking at you like that.”

— Kristen Roupenian

16. “The opportunities available to actors who achieved the peak of their fame as nameless characters in 1990s softcore horror porn films must be limited.”

— Kristen Roupenian

17. “He unrequitedly loved Anna; Anna unrequitedly loved Marco; Marco probably unrequitedly loved some rando none of them had ever met. The world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.”

— Kristen Roupenian

18. “Still, she really did seem to be absurdly into this. It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.”

— Kristen Roupenian

19. “Ted thought maybe he could start a fight about Shelly that could serve as a distraction. Or maybe he should just knock over the nearest video display and flee the state.”

— Kristen Roupenian

20. “She doesn’t know what to call it – this free-falling sensation she feels every time she looks at Taylor, like her hands are closing again and again on emptiness – but she thinks she knows better than to call it love.”

— Kristen Roupenian

21. “Given how little contact Ted had now with actual Anna, it was like he was in a relationship with an imaginary friend.”

— Kristen Roupenian

22. “He had no faith in love’s capacity to cause him anything but pain.”

— Kristen Roupenian

23. “Using covertly acquired information to feign a mysterious psychic bond was a new realm of deception for Ted.”

— Kristen Roupenian

24. “Why did no one satisfy her? What was she looking for that she couldn’t find? Her battered heart offered her no answers.”

— Kristen Roupenian

25. “There are tears in her eyes. Ted has never seen her look so despondent, and Anna often looks very, very sad.”

— Kristen Roupenian

26. “Every so often, over the next day or so, she would find herself in a gray, daydreamy mood, missing something, and she’d realize that it was Robert she missed, not the real Robert but the Robert she’d imagined on the other end of all those text messages during break.”

— Kristen Roupenian

27. “When I try to reconstruct the place that I was, at that point in my life, to figure out how I got there, to that punch, to that bed, to that girl – I can’t. I can see where some bad decisions led to some other bad decisions, but I can’t get all the way there; it’s like I imagine a curve, where I’m dropping lower and lower down, and then I’m off the radar screen, invisible, and then, after some time goes by, the line is rising, visible again, and I don’t know what happened in between.”

— Kristen Roupenian

28. “He felt like something deep inside had broken. He’d asked for nothing; he’d tried to content himself with as little as it was possible to want. Yet here he was, feeling humiliated and small once again.”

— Kristen Roupenian

29. “She puts her head on his shoulder, and for a second, it’s like the other good night, the night of the bonfire, the brief lifting of the yoke, freedom from the circle: Marco hurting Anna, Anna hurting Ted, Ted hurting Rachel, these endless rounds of jealousy and harm.”

— Kristen Roupenian

30. “Ted was wildly uncomfortable. He wasn’t quite sure who Rachel was on a date with, but it didn’t seem to be him. He’d contributed nothing to the outing; as far as he could tell, she could have brought an inflatable doll with her to the movie and had an equally good time.”

— Kristen Roupenian

31. “Whenever he was bored or anxious, his brain distracted itself by worrying at the question of whether he could ever make Anna like him, like a dog working the last bits of marrow from a bone.”

— Kristen Roupenian

32. “That was how I responded to beauty, in both women and men: drawn to it at first, and then recoiling. Ruled by my own shallow impulses, then angry at the trick.”

— Kristen Roupenian

33. “Lizzie is hapless about romance in an ironic, self-deprecating way.”

— Kristen Roupenian

34. “Ted thought: I am probably not dying but I am scared and alone and I don’t like this.”

— Kristen Roupenian

35. “Fantasies were fantasies, but it was important to keep at least one foot in the realm of the real.”

— Kristen Roupenian

36. “You want this, right? You know you want this. So go on. Finish it. Finish what you started.”

— Kristen Roupenian

37. “Perhaps the problem with adulthood was that you weighed the consequences of your actions too carefully, in a way that left you with a life you despised.”

— Kristen Roupenian

38. “Kath experiences a moment of confused dislocation, as though her soul has suddenly relocated into her body from very far away.”

— Kristen Roupenian

39. “Ted thinks: Everyone at this party could die tonight, including me, and I wouldn’t even care. He gets very drunk.”

— Kristen Roupenian