Home > Work > We're All Damaged
1 " We’re all damaged. Every single beautiful, stupid, precious one of us. Damaged, damaged, damaged. "
― Matthew Norman , We're All Damaged
2 " That’s the thing I hate most about my brain, the way it stores and catalogs things, all this dumb shit on a giant hard drive in my head, so I’m forced to obsess over it all like a crazy person. "
3 " Remember that string of movies when we were younger, like mid ’90s? The ones where the nerdy girl finally puts on makeup and a Wonderbra and everyone realizes how totally boneable she is?” “Yeah.” “Well, that’s you,” she says. “We’re in one of those movies. You’re my hopeless teenage girl, all stuck in your shell, and I’m here to give you a fresh coat of makeup and a slutty dress. Push those boobies up, Andy Carter, it’s go time.” “Do "
4 " Parenting is mostly bribery . . . and yelling. "
5 " The lesson here . . . Sometimes people throw things away. That doesn’t mean those things aren’t really, really good. Most of the time, it just means that person didn’t know what they had.” I’m "
6 " We hold on to the shitty things the tightest, for some reason. And "
7 " Maybe that’s just what moving on is, not getting over, but skipping over. And "
8 " They didn’t hate her when you were in high school. They made fun of her. She was the butt of jokes. But they didn’t hate her. That’s what people do now. They don’t disagree, they hate. "
9 " Right when you find yourself not thinking about her at all, there she’ll be, right at the end of the story to fuck with your head one last time.” She "
10 " Sometimes in life, it doesn’t matter that you’ve just woken up on a floor. Or that you haven’t brushed your teeth. Or that your hair is a mess and you’re wearing the clothes you slept in. Sometimes you just have to be polite. "
11 " Daughters,” he says. “You raise them and watch them grow up, and you love them so much it makes you crazy. Then one day some guy shows up. Maybe he’s nice. Maybe he’s got a good job. Maybe he’s got his shirt tucked in and he calls you sir. But he’s never quite what you’re hoping for. If you have one someday—a daughter, I mean—you’ll know what I’m talking about. "
12 " I’m comfortable with who I am,” I say, which is a funny thing to say while shaming my own body in a full-length mirror. “Shut "
13 " Are all our parents, collectively, fucked up? Have they always been fucked up, and it just takes us until our own adulthood to figure that out? “I "
14 " Back in the car, I sit for a long time, breathing. I’ll remember this, what just happened, for a very long time. I’ll be on my own deathbed someday, replaying this in my head, wishing it had gone differently. We hold on to the shitty things the tightest, for some reason. And this is the shittiest thing ever. “Are "
15 " In my experience, Fox News isn’t something you can tune out, like a game show or a cable movie you’ve seen a dozen times. The colors, the moving logos, the giant fonts, the . . . well . . . the things they actually say. It’s like the television equivalent of one of those cymbal-banging monkey toys being duct-taped to your forehead. So this is how it’d go. I’d hear something ridiculous, and I’d scoff or make some smart-ass comment, and then it’d be straight downhill from there. "
16 " Like pretty much every cat I’ve ever met, Jeter swings back and forth between loving me and trying to murder me, so I never know exactly what I’m getting. "
17 " Do you ever stop talking?” I say. “Seriously, it’s like you have a superarticulate form of Tourette syndrome. "
18 " Marriage isn’t easy, Andy,” he says. “You love someone in a specific time and place. But you have no idea what they’ll become. People change. Sometimes, they change so much you hardly even recognize them anymore.” For "
19 " I realize how utterly amazing it is that we’re all able as humans to go about our daily lives without constantly obsessing over the fact that each of us will almost certainly be in a sterile bed someday, medicated and slowly dying. This officially marks the most depressing thing that has ever crossed my mind. "
20 " All the stuff she says on the radio. It’s just fear. The world is leaving people like her behind, and it scares the shit out of her. "
