Quotes from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact - to keep from becoming cold and callous - and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn't spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“I feel like you want to think what you're feeling is really deep, like some seriously profound existential shit. But to me, it looks like the most tired, the most average thing in the world, the guy who is all interested in a woman until the very moment when it dawns on him that he has her. Wanting only what you can't have. The affliction of shallow morons everywhere.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“I’m sure a lot of it is my fault,” he said. He smiled ruefully. “And by a lot, I mean all.”
“Ah, the self-deprecating dude routine,” Hannah said. “ ‘What a lovable fuck-up I am.’ The annoying thing is that it makes you look good, but it doesn’t get me anything.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“Of course, these women ought to have listened when he told them he wasn't looking for anything serious. But on a certain level, it didn't really matter if it was stupid of them. Ethical people don't take advantage of other people's weakness; that's like being a slumlord or a price gouger. And treading on weakness is exactly what dating felt like, with so many of these women--with their wide-open hopefulness, their hunger for connection and blithe assumption that men wanted it just as badly.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“What began, after a few more minutes, to irritate him was that she didn’t even attempt to be engaging—made no effort toward wit or color in her replies. Only an attractive young woman would take for granted a stranger’s interest in the minutiae of her life.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“Each time Nate saw her, Elisa’s beauty struck him anew, as if in the interval the memory of what she actually looked like had been distorted by the tortured emotions she elicited since they’d broken up: in his mind, she took on the dimensions of an abject creature. What a shock when she opened the door, bursting with vibrant, almost aggressive good health. The power of her beauty, Nate had once decided, came from its ability to constantly reconfigure itself. When he thought he’d accounted for it, filed it away as a dead fact—pretty girl—she turned her head or bit her lip, and like a children’s toy you shake to reset, her prettiness changed shape, its coordinates altered: now it flashed from the elegant contours of her sloping brow and flaring cheekbone, now from her shyly smiling lips.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart -- but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way of real thought.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“She said some people were horizontally oriented, while others were vertical. Horizontally oriented people were concerned exclusively with what others think, with fitting in or impressing their peers. Vertically oriented people were obsessed only with some higher “truth,” which they believed in wholeheartedly and wanted to trumpet no matter who was interested. People who are horizontally oriented are phonies and sycophants, while those who are entirely vertically oriented lack all social skill—they’re the ones on the street shouting about the apocalypse. Normal people are in the middle, but veer one way or the other.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“Many of those late nights, when he'd paced his apartment, his mind roaming the world he'd painstakingly created and could finally inhabit - moving within it from character to character, feverishly distilling into words thoughts not his own but theirs - had been ecstasies of absorption and self-forgetfulness.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“...in a certain sense, it's harder for men to say no to sex than it is for women. When a woman says no, nobody's feelings are hurt. Men expect to be shot down. But when a man says no, the woman feels as if he's just said she's fat and undesirable. That makes him feel like a jerk.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“He thought women were every bit as intelligent as men, every bit as capable of figuring out how long it would take for train A to crash into train B if the two were moving toward each other at an average speed of C. They were as capable of rational thought; they just didn’t appear to be as interested in it. They were happy to apply rational argument to defend what they already believed but unlikely to be swayed by it, not if it conflicted with inclination or, worse, intuition, not if it undercut a cherished opinion or nettled their self-esteem. So many times, when Nate had been arguing with a woman, a point was reached when it became clear that no argument would alter her thinking. Her position was one she “felt” to be true; it was, as a result, impermeable.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“The words trailed off, and she smiled helplessly as she waited for him to rescue her from her own sentence. Nate's thoughts had been far removed from relationship issues, and he didn't feel like getting drawn into another of these conversations. He also didn't like being pressured to provide reassurances on demand, being made to perform his affection at someone else's bidding, like a trained seal. Besides, it seemed that in soliciting reassurance - after everything that had been said the other night - Hannah was allowing herself to give in to a neurotic compulsion. That wasn't something he wanted to reward.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“...the belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was bestowed by the same invisible hand that ensured that the deli would have milk to drink and sandwiches to buy.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“...good drivers are people who can put their brains on cruise control.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“He would have denied it, even to himself -deemed it a laughable affectation- but it seemed to him now that he had always secretly believed that in the way he lived (he refused to say his "lifestyle"), in his freelance, un-health-insured, sparsely thinged life, he was in a small way registering a rejection-of conformity, of middle-class convention, of not just acquisitiveness but enslavement to the idol of "security." Nevertheless, he'd wound up in the same place as everyone else. Was this - latte liberalism - his inescapable fate? Surely it was. It was sheer vanity to pretend otherwise.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn’t the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the “intuitive” also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“Men and women on relationships are like men and women on orgasms, except in reverse," Jason continued boisterously. "Women crave relationships the way men crave orgasm. Their whole being bends to its imperative. Men, in contrast, want relationships the way women want orgasm: sometimes, under the right circumstances.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“His intelligence was just something he'd been born with. Luck of the draw, like being beautiful. It was a rationalization to say that he'd worked hard. It was like being given a fine knife and taking the trouble to polish and sharpen it: it's great that you make the effort, but someone had to give you the knife.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“A vida quotidiana de Nate era caracterizada por surtos de produtividade pontuados por quedas graduais na letargia, solidão, imundície e melancolia. Os seus maus humores perpetuavam-se por si sós.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“-É arrogância pensar que o Lolita é melhor do que um programa de televisão sobre animais de estimação? - insistiu ele.
-É arrogância pensarmos que somos melhores do que outra pessoa só porque essa pessoa não gosta da narrativa mais elegante do mundo sobre abuso sexual de crianças.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“As he tore his eyes from the books to meet hers, he was, as a matter of fact, nearly overwhelmed by sadness. It gusted over him. He felt almost unbearably lonely. He wondered if he was flawed on some deep level, whether – in spite of all the friends who seemed to think he was a good guy (and he was a pretty good friend), in spite of being a fairly decent son – there was something terribly wrong with him. Did romance reveal some truth, fundamental lack, a coldness, that made him shrink back at just the moment when reciprocity was called for?”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“smart people only mated with smart people, class structures would ossify. There’d be a permanent underclass of stupid people.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“It was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“Aurit argued that for the person with more power in a relationship to refuse to take seriously the unhappiness of the other, simply because nothing is forcing them to, is the ultimate dick move: “It’s like if the United States in the 1950s said, ‘Sorry, black people in the South, but if you don’t like the way you’re being treated, you can go back to Africa.”
― Adelle Waldman, quote from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

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