Quotes from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“There are two kinds of people I don't trust: people who don't drink and people who collect stickers.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“My mother told me that life isn't always about pleasing yourself and that sometimes you have to do things for the sole benefit of another human being. I completely agreed with her, but reminded her that that was what blow jobs were for.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“Have you ever experienced a pain so sharp in your heart that it's all you can do to take a breath? It's a pain you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy; you wouldn't want to pass it on to anyone else for fear he or she might not be able to bear it. It's the pain of being betrayed by a person with whom you've fallen in love. It's not as serious as death, but it feels a whole lot like it, and as I've come to learn, pain is pain any way you slice it.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“My relationship with my father had been on the proverbial fritz since the time I was fifteen and called the police to report him for child molesting. He had never molested me, but I wanted to have a party that weekend and needed him out of the house.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I had to feign interest in all this nonsense until I could ask when I could come over and sit on his face. I didn't say that out loud, of course. I never say the things I really want to. If I did, I'd have no friends.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I don't like the word 'alcoholic'. I like to think of myself as an advanced drinker.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“Ivory's the kind of girl who gets drunk and immediately starts slurring. I have a lot of friends like that, and I think it's because it makes me look 'more together.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“Our relationship finally ended when he took to waking me up in the wee hours of the morning when he would go surfing. He thought it might be fun to have me come watch. "Fun for who?" I wanted to ask. I had never asked him to come to Happy Hour and watch me drink.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I don't know what it is about accents that makes me want to get undressed and high-five myself.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“He was all emotion all the time, constantly talking about his feelings and his profound love for her. He was minutes from getting his first period. He wrote poems too. It's my personal belief that if men are writing poems, they're making up for something else like a big hair back, or one ball. Not that one ball is a bad thing. Especially since I don't know any females who are dying to their their hands on a set of balls. The way I see it, the less balls, the better.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I never say the things I really want to. If I did, I'd have no friends.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“Lydia was the kind of friend whom people referred to as a 'party favor' -- always fun to be around but she doesn't have any patience for suffering unless it's her own.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I was in a tailspin of confusion I hadn't experienced since the first time I heard George W. Bush speak.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I look hot and, most of all, skinny. I love the day after throwing up. I felt like a feather.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“One of my girlfriends was getting married. This was becoming an annoying pattern.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“We got to his place and it looked a lot like his personality. Just a bunch of space filler, nothing to really wow you. It looked like he had bought a lot of stuff from IKEA and then decided to refinish it at home. Everything was neat and tidy, but you wouldn't want any of it for yourself.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“It's not the concept of marriage I have a problem with. I'd like to get married too. A couple times. It's the actual wedding that pisses me off.
The problem is that everyone who gets married seems to think that they are the first person in the entire universe to do it, and that the year leading up to the event revolves entirely around them. You have to throw them showers, bachelorette weekends, buy a bridesmaid dress, and then buy a ticket to some godforsaken town wherever they decide to drag you. If you're really unlucky, they'll ask you to recite a poem at their wedding. That's just what I want to do- monitor my drinking until I'm done with my public service announcement. And what do we get out of it, you ask? A dry piece of chicken and a roll in the hay with their hillbilly cousin. I could get that at home, thanks.
Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out! I always want to remind the person that absolutely no thought went into typing in a name and having a salad bowl come up.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“It was Valentine's Day and I had spent the day in bed with my life partner, Ketel One. The two of us watched a romance movie marathon on TBS Superstation that made me wonder how people who write romantic comedies can sleep at night.

At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall all-the-time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.

Then, within the two hour time frame of the movie, the couple meet, fall in love, fall out of love, break up, and then just before the end of the movie, they happen to bump into each other by "coincidence" somewhere absolutely absurd, like by the river. This never happens in real life. The last time I bumped into an ex-boyfriend was at three o'clock in the morning at Rite Aid. I was ringing up Gas-X and corn removers.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I had to sit down and explain to [her friend] that AA was for quitters”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out!”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I'm not that shallow, asshole. I don't need money. It's way more important for them to be good-looking.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I don't like to overdose. Call me old-fashioned.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“Even if times are tough and you're enduring a terrible heartache, it's important to focus your anger on a vibrator, not another person.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“There are many ways to get to know someone, and my favorite is seeing them naked in Happy Baby pose.

I also feel it is important to have sex soon after meeting someone in order to find out if you have sexual chemistry together. Otherwise, you could wait two to three months after you start dating someone only to discover that your new boyfriend is bad in bed, or even worse, is into anal beads and duct tape.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“Seeing your mother naked is not something you easily recover from. Seeing your mother naked and jumping from one side of a king-sized bed to the other with a nurse's hat on while your father, who is also naked, is chasing her with a bandanna around his neck, is reason to put yourself up for adoption.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“When I get married, I'm gonna register at Bank of America.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“I had always dreamed of being a professional escort but never thought that there was any real money in it.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“We went to a Barnes and Noble, where I picked up an unauthorized
biography of M.C. Hammer, and not wanting to overload her on her first
book, I steered Dumb Dumb toward a Choose Your Own Adventure.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

“After discovering him in his threesome, I spent the next two weeks in bed suffering from a severe case of vagina elbow. It's a condition not unlike tennis elbow, but you get it from masturbating.”
― Chelsea Handler, quote from My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

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“Night-time, regarded as a separate sphere of creation, is a universe in itself. The material nature of man, upon which philosophers tell us that a column of air forty-five miles in height continually presses, is wearied out at night, sinks into lassitude, lies down, and finds repose. The eyes of the flesh are closed; but in that drooping head, less inactive than is supposed, other eyes are opened. The unknown reveals itself. The shadowy existences of the invisible world become more akin to man; whether it be that there is a real communication, or whether things far off in the unfathomable abyss are mysteriously brought nearer, it seems as if the impalpable creatures inhabiting space come then to contemplate our natures, curious to comprehend the denizens of the earth. Some phantom creation ascends or descends to walk beside us in the dim twilight: some existence altogether different from our own, composed partly of human consciousness, partly of something else, quits his fellows and returns again, after presenting himself for a moment to our inward sight; and the sleeper, not wholly slumbering, nor yet entirely conscious, beholds around him strange manifestations of life—pale spectres, terrible or smiling, dismal phantoms, uncouth masks, unknown faces, hydra-headed monsters, undefined shapes, reflections of moonlight where there is no moon, vague fragments of monstrous forms. All these things which come and go in the troubled atmosphere of sleep, and to which men give the name of dreams, are, in truth, only realities invisible to those who walk about the daylight world. The dream-world is the Aquarium of Night.”
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