The Mutual Friend Quotes

“When you die young, you get plopped down into this situation that most people need decades to get ready for. That's all growing old is: learning how to kick the bucket. My shrink calls it a "workshop of loss." One by one the world takes away all the things that matter to you, and one by one you learn how to let them go. My looks. My health. My wife.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“This is why falling in love is the business of the young. When you've only just begun your definitions, you can write the rest together, side by side, copying off each other's papers. Of course, you can fall in love at any point in your life. Nobody's stopping you. You just have to stay young.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“Every time we meet someone new, we cross a border into a land that shares the rudiments of our language, but with a dialect as unique as our very selves. When I say "I love you," it's with the implicit prayer that it means the same thing in your dialect as in mine. The pain of life is that so often it doesn't. The jackpot of life is that, once or twice if you're lucky, it does.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“For some, love is wings. For others, it's a prison. For still others, it's a chair.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“I am sitting in a chair. You read those words and you picture a chair. You don't picture my chair. You picture your chair - your idea of a chair. It might be the first chair you ever saw. It might be the one you're sitting in now. When I tell you about my chair, I'm telling you about your chair.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“In happy moments, these things intersect, the sheet fits the bed, and the whole thing just works. But for the most part, What You Want and What You Can Have are two different trains on parallel tracks, forever waving to each other from the window, never quite meeting.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“What You Want and What You Can Have. This is all there is to life.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“You are born with a nervous system. This nervous system determines What You Want. Between this nervous system and the world is a body.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“It was a picture Bob had taken, and he couldn't understand how that photo wasn't emotionally rancid for her, how she could just casually leave that moment in the front window of her life, just some happy little memory unencumbered by any kind of pain or regret.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“What had this evening actually meant? What had the last three years, or the last twenty-eight years, truly, actually meant?”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“Another name on the long list of friends for whom she couldn't take on the vast emotional labor of texting a quick "hey.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“They put in the walls and the doors and painted the tree the color of the sky it would never see again.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“What is it like to want? Does it hurt? Or is it wonderful? Do people want to want? Or is to want to want to want no more?”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“Emotionally, he was a succulent, wanting little more than a phone call on his birthdays and holidays, if that even.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“A married politician got caught with his mistress and she was amused, until a child with a disability climbed to the top of a rock wall and she was hopeful, until a friend announced he'd bought his first home and she was jealous, until an article confirmed the seas were rising and she was scared, until a panda got a bucket stuck on his head and she LOL'd, and so on and so on, each emotion erasing its predecessor from the dry-erase board of her mind.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother

“He had done me the two greatest favors that anyone had ever done me in my life: he got me out, and then he let me go.”
― Carter Bays, The Mutual Friend: the unmissable debut novel from the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother