The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
Adelle Waldman
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
success, love, new-york-city, the-love-affairs-of-nathaniel-p, feminism, intelligence, weekend, relationship, single, fiction, dating, attraction
