David Rakoff Quotes

There’s nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking; pessimism is detail-oriented thinking.

I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.

I am neither spontaneous nor ready for anything.

I am going to the bad place, as is my wont.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you know that you’re being visited by your own future? They come so rarely and with little fanfare, those moments. They’re not particularly photogenic. There’s no breach in the clouds to reveal the shining city on a hill. No folk dancing children outside your bus, no production values to speak of- just a glimpse of such quotidian, incontrovertible truth that after the initial shock at the supreme weirdness of it all, a kind of calm sets in. So this is to be my life.

There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.

We’re creatures of contact regardless of whether/ we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.

In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I’m fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.

What remains of your past if you didn’t allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don’t have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.

New York is breaking my heart. I’ve often said that it’s like having a really interesting boyfriend suddenly becoming really, really into wine, and having to have endless conversations about it.

Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.

Simplicity, it seems, has always been wasted on those who simply cannot appreciate it