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. “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

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

22. “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

23. “It was a scandal, calling out women for changing the rules on men with no warning because of their vapid women’s lib and their stupid sexual awakenings. Sexual awakenings were not supposed to extend beyond what was merely an upgrade in enjoyment for men.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

24. “You opted in. You didn’t tell them about your asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all outward appearances. You thought you could be part of it just a little.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

26. “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

27. “Like every other woman in the world who has ever been told to calm down, Rachel had no idea how to behave.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

28. “He understood divorce in a macro way, of course. But he had not yet adjusted to it in a micro way, in the other-side-of-the-bed-being-empty way, in the nobody-to-tell-you-were-running-late way, in the you-belong-to-no-one way.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

29. “This was only one of the awful parts of being pregnant. Right before you were pregnant, you were a person. The minute you became an incubator for another life, you got reduced to your parts.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

30. “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

31. “One day he would not be recently divorced, but he would never forget those questions, the way people pretended to care for him while they were really asking after themselves.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

32. “Miriam had only heard of gender imbalance; how could she have experienced it? She didn’t work.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

33. “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

34. “People under forty had optimism. They had optimism for the future; they didn’t accept that their future was going to resemble their present with alarming specificity. They had velocity. He couldn’t bear velocity just at that moment.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

35. “When she put her money toward feminist causes, she was actually just addressing rumors she’d heard of a patriarchy.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

36. “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

37. “I planned playdates and barbecues and pediatric dental checkups and adult dental checkups and plain old internists and plain old pediatricians and hair salon treatments and educational testing and cleats-buying and art class attendance and pediatric ophthalmologist and adult ophthalmologist and now, suddenly, mammograms. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

38. “She was becoming, it seemed to him, the kind of girl that it was completely exhausting to be.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

39. “Toby had been told all his life that being in love means never having to say you’re sorry. But no, it was actually being divorced that meant never having to say you’re sorry.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

40. “Our defenses were the same: sarcasm, pettiness, a protective well-readness that we hoped conveyed that we were smarter than everyone. I liked him. I could have even like-liked him.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

41. “He would never be comforted by the adage “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” after that. Because what is the metric of handling something? Not killing yourself?”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

42. “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

43. “You can do this, he tried to get his brain to inform him. You can do this no matter what. But his brain had told him a lot of things over the years. His brain wasn’t very reliable.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

44. “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

45. “He looked across the room to her at that party, and she looked back at him and smiled. So much time had passed since then and yet that was Rachel for him. He had spent so many years in the service of trying to relocate that Rachel within the Rachel that she kept proving herself to be. But even now it was that version of Rachel that was the first that ever came to mind when he thought of her. He felt he would be doing worlds better if it weren’t.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

46. “That first night, on the phone, Toby was so grateful that I wasn’t going to make him pay for his abandonment of me or treat him like an injured kitten that he became giddy, and he laughed more and so I laughed more. And in our laughter we heard our youth, and it is not not a dangerous thing to be at the doorstep to middle age and at an impasse in your life and to suddenly be hearing sounds from your youth.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

47. “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

48. “Toby walked the kids through the hot night over to Seventy-ninth and Park, where Cyndi and Todd Leffer lived. On the way, with Hannah still ignoring him, he listened to Solly make a case for watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom again, and they passed a building where he had a clear memory of getting blown by a woman in a stairwell just three weeks ago.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

49. “The girls in her class had first names like Clancy and Devon and Atterleigh and Westerleigh and Bonneleigh and Plum and Poppy and Catherine. And Catherine and Catherine and Catherine and Catherine.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

50. “TRULY, NONE OF us could have predicted that this was how it would end up for Toby. We were twenty when we met on our junior years abroad in Israel.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner