David Rakoff
Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Memories
Just think, the shoes I wouldn’t be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in.Collection: Thinking
The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.Collection: Lonely
There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it’s really true: I should have stayed home.Collection: Regret
I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Betrayal
If psychoanalysis was late 19th century secular Judaism’s way of finding spiritual meaning in a post-religious world, and retail is the late 20th century’s way of finding spiritual meaning in a post-religious world, what does it mean that I’m impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday?Collection: Spiritual
Youth is not wasted on the young, it is perpetrated on the young.Collection: Youth
I have so little control over the act of writing that it's all I can do to remain conscious.Collection: Writing
Almost any age is better than twenty-two.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Future
Unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask.Collection: Would Be
But if one's dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder.Collection: Beautiful
Central to living a life that is good, is a life that's forgiving.Collection: Generosity
In the window, I fantasize... about providing grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight.Collection: Children
One of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.Collection: Mind
I had a tumor. But it was great.Collection: Tumors
I do not go outdoors. Not more than I have to. As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.Collection: New York
There are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn’t strike me as one of them. Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.Collection: Men
I am neither spontaneous nor ready for anything.Collection: Spontaneity
You can't win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say, 'Why am I not winning this contest as well?' It's random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren't me? Absolutely. I still can't make that logistic jump to thinking there's a reason why it shouldn't be me.Collection: Winning
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.Collection: Children
Simplicity, it seems, has always been wasted on those who simply cannot appreciate itCollection: Inspiration
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.Collection: New York