"I had no plans as to my future financial sustainability: I never wanted to earn money for doing anything. ...I knew that I would eventually have to enter full-time employment, I certainly never fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy."
"I liked to sit in the library...allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows. I would open fifteen tabs on my web browser while producing phrases like 'epistemic rearticulation' and 'operant discursive practices.' I mostly forgot to eat on days like this and emerged in the eveing with a fine, shrill headache." (It could be noted that I am currently typing in a library. Granola bag in my bag. Having eaten a handful of cashews with my dark roast this morning.)
"Actors learn to communicate things without feeling them, I thought."
"I looked at her like she was something very far away from me, a friend I used to have, or someone whose name I didn't remember."
"Was I kind to others? Did I only worry about this question becaase as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was 'kindness' just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone."
"If there's one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets."
"Physically I felt almost nothing, just a mild discomfort. I let myself become rigid and silent, waiting for him to notice my rigidity and stop what he was doing, but he didn't. I considered asking him to stop, but the idea that he might ignore me felt more serious than the situation needed to be. Don't get yourself into a big legal thing, I thought. Just lay there and let him continue. He asked me if I liked it rough and I told him I didn't think so, but he pulled my hair anyway. I wanted to laugh, and after that I hated myself for feeling superior."
"I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer would't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would."
"The time moved past visibly on the illuminated onscreen clock and yet I still felt as though I didn't notice it passing. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen."
"I liked to sit in the library...allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows. I would open fifteen tabs on my web browser while producing phrases like 'epistemic rearticulation' and 'operant discursive practices.' I mostly forgot to eat on days like this and emerged in the eveing with a fine, shrill headache." (It could be noted that I am currently typing in a library. Granola bag in my bag. Having eaten a handful of cashews with my dark roast this morning.)
"Actors learn to communicate things without feeling them, I thought."
"I looked at her like she was something very far away from me, a friend I used to have, or someone whose name I didn't remember."
"Was I kind to others? Did I only worry about this question becaase as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was 'kindness' just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone."
"If there's one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets."
"Physically I felt almost nothing, just a mild discomfort. I let myself become rigid and silent, waiting for him to notice my rigidity and stop what he was doing, but he didn't. I considered asking him to stop, but the idea that he might ignore me felt more serious than the situation needed to be. Don't get yourself into a big legal thing, I thought. Just lay there and let him continue. He asked me if I liked it rough and I told him I didn't think so, but he pulled my hair anyway. I wanted to laugh, and after that I hated myself for feeling superior."
"I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer would't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would."
"The time moved past visibly on the illuminated onscreen clock and yet I still felt as though I didn't notice it passing. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen."
Lena Dunham is a liar. I wanted to hate this book so I could earnestly type that sentence in regards to literary endorsements. However, after months of picking up Rooney's much-lauded debut and putting it down, uninterested, it was Dunham's Instagram post that made me take a fourteenth look at this book. AND I LOVED IT.
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