Top 90 Taffy Brodesser-Akner Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “How miserable is too miserable?”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

60. “That was why you heard about people in their thirties and forties going to law school but never medical school. It wasn’t just the time it would take to get licensed. It was the realization as you got older about how fallible you were in every aspect of your life.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

61. “She never once thought she deserved happiness. She never once wondered if there was something better out there. This was their marriage; this was their family. It was theirs, they owned it, they made it. If there was one thing she’d learned from her grandmother, it was an understanding that life isn’t always what you want it to be, and obligations are obligations and nothing less.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

62. “She filed all the ways she was put off under an enormous label called Weren’t You Listening? When she was annoyed and she spoke with him, her face reminded him of the faces of people he’d seen die: The animating force taken away from them, they looked like completely different people. It terrified him.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

63. “I was still living on Carmine Street when I fell in love with my first editor, Glenn, back at the first magazine I worked at out of college, TV Tonight. Glenn was married, with three children. He wasn’t the most handsome guy in our office, but he was the one who telegraphed a kind of stability that I was boring enough to find sexy.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “She was not at the gym, or coming back from the gym in a less black mood than usual, not by much but a little.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

68. “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

69. “The only thing more offensive than Miriam not working was Miriam thinking she did work.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

70. “There was not a number at which anyone said, “I have a good life. I’d like to see if I can help someone else have a good life.” These were criminals – yes, most of them were real, live criminals. Not always with jailable offenses, but certainly morally abhorrent ones: They had offshore accounts or they underpaid their assistants or they didn’t pay taxes on their housekeepers or they were NRA members.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

71. “My voice only came alive then I was talking about someone else; my ability to see the truth and to extrapolate human emotion based on what I saw and was told didn’t extend to myself.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

72. “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

73. “He would love a dinner party full of crazy people. But he didn’t want a life with a crazy person.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

74. “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

75. “Our fourth lunch: “It’s like group therapy,” he said, eating a scoop of cottage cheese, and talking about all these new people he’d dated, so many of whom had been through the same thing.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

77. “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

78. “He didn’t want to be set up with people. He didn’t want to know what his friends thought he was worthy of. All of this was still so new that the only thing he could tolerate was the ice-cold democracy of a dating app.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

79. “It was dark on the second day when it occurred to him that he had to take action on some of these conversations. He realized it because a woman he was messaging with wrote, So will I see that cute face anytime soon or not?”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

80. “Miriam said something, and then Cindy talked for either an hour more or a minute more but Toby didn’t hear anything after that because his blood froze, and his inner ear began to bleed, and his brain turned to putty and began to leak out his nose, and his face melted off his skull, and his life would never be the same and he knew right then he’d never understand another thing ever again.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

81. “Hannah snarled at him that he’d chosen the wrong outfit, that the leggings were for tomorrow, and so he held up her tiny red shorts and she swiped them out of his hands with the disgust of a person who was not committed to any consideration of scale when it came to emotional display.”

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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