Top 90 Taffy Brodesser-Akner Quotes (2026 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. “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

5. “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

6. “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

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

8. “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

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

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. “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.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

35. “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

36. “We aren’t meant to comprehend endings. We aren’t meant to understand death. Death’s whole gig is not being understood.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “They went to concerts and the opera and took French lessons outside of school and then went to actual France and they became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t – in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

45. “She spat the lo mein back into the carton. It was disgusting. Why would you eat spaghetti from a Chinese place?”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

46. “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

47. “They became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t-in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

48. “Weekends were endless. If you needed to know the most disparate thing about Adam and me it was that he loved them and I did not. I liked order and routine. Weekends were an abyss that was exactly long enough to stare back at me.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

49. “He had a slightly lazy eye, which would stray only when he’d been staring at you for a long time, as if the eye were done with the conversation and was hinting at the rest of him that it was time to go.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

50. “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