Top 90 Taffy Brodesser-Akner Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “How could you be this far along in life and still so unsettled? How could you know so much and still be this baffled by it all? Was this what enlightenment felt like, an understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying? That the dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it? Or maybe that wasn’t life. Maybe that was just middle age.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

2. “Maybe it was the insult of childbirth. Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart woman does, the constraints of this world on a woman.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

3. “If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart person does, the constraints of this world on a woman. I couldn’t bear it. I saw it too clearly and.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

4. “We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is about trying to remember that moment?”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

5. “That was maybe the the worst insult of adulthood, that even your silly, non-life-threatening, non-base desires got swallowed up by routine and maturity and edged out of your life for good.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

6. “There were so many ways of being a woman in the world, but all of them still rendered her just a woman, which is to say: a target.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

7. “It’s crazy that the friends you’re fondest of from your youth sometimes resemble people you would cross the street to avoid as an adult.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

8. “A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

9. “It was that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

10. “He looked out onto the world and was so excited about the number of dusks that lay ahead of him. He wanted to use every single of them well. He wanted to spend each one of them with only people he loved. He wanted to run to the camp upstate right this instant and take his children outside their bunks and apologize for all the wasted twilights. He wanted to pick each child up and spin them around. He wanted to tell them that if they miss a twilight, not to worry, it will always come again.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

11. “Or because his biggest fear was to be known and rejected, and the only way he could face the rejection that comes along with being human was to never let himself be known – that way, what was rejected wasn’t him at all, but a projection of him.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

12. “Sam Rothberg was all that Toby felt he needed to protect his family from. Sam Rothberg was who he pictured when Solly said he wanted to go to golf camp and Toby’s blood ran cold from the implications of this place where he lived inside but felt he existed outside – this place he was in but not of. His children were of it, though. He realized that now. They never stood a chance.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

13. “They sent me texts and flowers that told me I really understood them in a way that no one had before, and I realized that all humans are essentially the same, but only some of us, the men, were truly allowed to be that without apology.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

14. “He was annoyed that he had to apologize when he hadn’t done anything wrong. He wasn’t married anymore. He didn’t have to constantly apologize when he didn’t mean it.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

15. “Adam who was the best-case scenario in an incredibly flawed system.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

16. “But being an unmarried man at a certain age, it’s like there’s no place for you in the world. The world needs you to have a family, or you’re always someone’s bachelor friend who he can use for a good time, but who has nothing substantial himself.” Toby was shocked, maybe unfairly but still, that Seth had such a depth of understanding of his place in the world.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

17. “She was alternatively panicked that the time was going by and angry it didn’t go by faster.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

18. “Amicable amicable amicable. Did you ever notice that you only use the word amicable in relation to divorce? Was it because it was so often used for divorce that you didn’t want to poison anything else with it? The way you could say “malignant” for things other than cancer but you never did?”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

19. “I couldn’t bear being this suburban mom who was alternating between screaming at her kids and being the heartfelt, privileged witness to their joy. But the people around us – the haranguing mothers and sexless fathers – I kept trying to find ways that I was better than these people, but all I kept landing on was the fact that the common denominator was me.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

20. “At the bowling alley, Sam’s giant hands selected a marbled red ball and flung it through the air so that it could land on the oiled alley like a swan and score him, yes, his third strike.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

21. “Being at the hospital was like being inside the future, but as it was imagined by science fiction films in the last part of the twentieth century, not the actual future we ended up with, where everything just turned out being smaller and flimsier than it used to be.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

22. “There isn’t room in one marriage for two people who are hogging all the oxygen.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

23. “Do you realize that you never react to anything I say unless it’s about you?” I asked him. “What do you mean?” “I mean, I’m a real person with a soul and I could use a friend, too?” “What possible need could you have?”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

24. “The expectation now was for a woman to show up, panting with horniness, on all fours, just begging for it. Then, once it was over, wink and giggle and recede into some background and pretend that this was all okay, that the intimacy was a physical need she had and feel free to never call her again.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

25. “There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

26. “The men hadn’t had any external troubles. They didn’t have a fear that they didn’t belong. They hadn’t had any obstacles. They were born knowing they belonged, and they were reassured at every turn just in case they’d forgotten.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

27. “The stories he heard from divorced women were all the same – not the details, but the themes: This thing I thought was just a whim was actually an important part of my spouse’s identity, and still I’m surprised. This thing they had always been doing they kept doing and still I’m surprised.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

28. “You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment – that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

29. “I never misrepresented myself,” he’d say. That was a favorite, as if people weren’t supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

30. “When I told people what I did, they’d say, “Being a mother is the hardest job there is.” But it wasn’t. The hardest job there was was being a mother and having an actual job, with pants and a commuter train pass and pens and lipstick. Back when I had a job, no one ever said to me, “Having an actual job and being a mother is the hardest job there is.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

31. “Sleepovers, as far as Toby could tell, consisted of the girls in her class getting together and forming alliances and lobbing microaggressions at each other in an all-night cold war, and they did this voluntarily.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

32. “I’m not a perv,” Seth said, even though there were literally hundreds of women who would absolutely have classified Seth as a perv.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

33. “What was so much better than stability and the love of a good person who rooted for you? We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is trying to remember that moment? We watch ourselves and our spouses change, and the work is to constantly recall the reasons you did this in the first place.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

34. “I went back to the bench and lit a cigarette and inhaled, the smoke entering my body and filling it with poison, with something.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

35. “Toby had heard from other doctors who worked with a poorer clientele that less fortunate people are more accepting of these things. Not the rich ones. Rich patients couldn’t believe that money couldn’t help, that their positions and club memberships and status couldn’t help. They couldn’t believe that nobody was coming to save them. But nobody was coming to save them.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

36. “IT MUST HAVE been that his dreams were too real, or else that he was never really asleep, because when he woke up that Saturday, it was like he’d been waiting to open his eyes. The whole night he had been stuck in the gloaming where sleep kept threatening, but all he got were hallucinations. He’d forgotten to pull the shades, so the room was too bright. The air-conditioning was working now but making a weird sound.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

37. “Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

38. “Once, she woke him up in the middle of the night after she came home from some event, and began poking around in the blanket for his boxers like she was looking for batteries in the junk drawer, and when she saw nothing was going on down there, she said, “I guess this is it, then.” He had no idea what she meant. She began crying and screaming at him, telling him how miserable she was.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

39. “Our fifth lunch: “It couldn’t be me,” he said as he ate four turkey slices with mustard and no bread. “There are too many of us who want the best for our children and our spouses. Sometimes you end up married to someone who didn’t realize she didn’t want to be married. I mean, look at this.” He swiped up a photo. A perfectly lovely woman with dimples, wearing a bathing suit and squinting in the sun.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

40. “Now that I stay at home, I can say it out loud. But now that I don’t work, no one is listening. No one listens to stay-at-home mothers, which, I guess, is why we were so careful about their feelings in the first place.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

41. “What was so much better than stability and the love of a good person who rooted for you? We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is about trying to remember that moment?”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

42. “Or I wanted to understand how to live a life that I was not the star of, to learn to recede into the background and be what my children needed from me and every time I came close I felt a vast abyss and ran in the opposite direction.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

43. “I leaned against his shoulder, which required a full coccyx-to-neck side curl, since his shoulder reached considerably below any part of my head, and so that I had to bend my torso-neck-head into the shape of a C.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

44. “Solly understood. Solly knew. Solly was his in a way that made him never wonder if all of this had been worth it. He had Toby’s same internal need for things to be okay. Solly wanted peace, just like his father.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

45. “But also, divorce is about forgetfulness – a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos – the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments. Their marriage would not forgive them for getting older, and they would not forgive their marriage for witnessing it.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

46. “In my life, I’d go to weddings where the bride wore a red dress.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

47. “His misery was a fog that obscured slightly but not completely an entirely new land of opportunity. He did not realize that the land of opportunity was obscuring something even more potent.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

48. “He didn’t feel bad for her anymore. Instead, he just felt foolish, the way quiet, smart people can make you feel dumb just for existing.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

49. “Her youth was so staggering it was offensive.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

50. “And yes, if you believe his version, she was a vile kind of ex-wife. All ex-wives are vile to hear it. But she was also someone who had been driven crazy. Maybe it was the insult of childbirth. Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy is you’re a smart person.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner