Hyperbole and a Half Quotes

“-to me, the future doesn't seem real. It's just this magical place where I can put my responsibilities so that I don't have to be scared while hurtling toward failure at right hundred miles per hour.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“I prepare for my new life as an adult like some people prepare for the apocalypse”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“When you have to spend every social interacting manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“words that revealed more about my tenuous grasp on reality”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“My ego hates getting out of its tower to deal with this shit.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“I silently assessed our predicament before deciding to implement the only real plan I could come up with. It was a risky plan—a plan that could easily backfire. But it was my only option. I was going to have to scare my mother out of the forest. Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to think of anything frightening enough to breach her grown-up resistance to scary kid stories. But a few nights earlier, she had watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while she thought I was asleep. Unfortunately, I wasn’t asleep. I was hiding behind the couch. And I had imprinted everything I’d seen that night. I imagine it would be pretty terrifying to be wandering through the forest at night when, out of nowhere, your eight-year-old child begins describing the plot from the horror film you watched the other night, which, as far as you know, she hadn’t seen. But my mother maintained her composure very well—until a twig snapped, at which point she whirled around shrieking, “WE HAVE A DOG!” As if Murphy’s presence were enough to deter a homicidal psychopath with a chainsaw. It was too much. All the helplessness and frustration that she had been trying so hard to hide from us came rushing to the surface.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“We had spent hours combing the forest for the biggest, brownest, heaviest, cleanest pine cones it could offer, hoping that maybe, just maybe, if we found exactly the right ones, our mother would let us go home. We had bled for them. And now she was telling us that we had to abandon them. We were confused and more than a little demoralized, but we dutifully piled our pine cones near some bushes while our mom started playing “who can yell ‘help’ the loudest and the most” by herself. It was a pretty anticlimactic game and we lost interest quickly. We didn’t understand why she had suddenly become so intensely interested in playing these stupid games. Did she not realize it was getting dark?”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“She had to think fast if she wanted to maintain the illusion that we were still hanging out in the forest on purpose. We didn’t want to find pine cones. We wanted to go home. But we didn’t really have a choice. Our leader wanted us to collect pine cones, so we obeyed, hoping that we could placate her as quickly as possible and move on. We had severely underestimated how difficult the task was going to be. We’d gather a bunch of pine cones, then trot over to our mother and ask her if we had found enough to be able to go home. “No. But maybe there are more on the other side of that hill,” she’d say. So we’d march over the hill to look for more. When we were on the other side of the hill, she’d say, “See where Murphy is on the far side of that meadow? I bet there are bigger pine cones over there. Let’s go find out!” Then she wanted browner pine cones. Then heavier pine cones. Several hours later, we had come no closer to meeting our mother’s ludicrous standards. We were beginning to lose hope.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“Dear thirteen-year-old, I think everyone was relieved when you started to grow out of your unhealthy obsession with dogs. Unfortunately, now you think you are a wizard. I know this because I found your collection of spells. Tell me, how does mixing Dijon mustard with sand and then eating it make someone love you? First of all, I thought your extensive early experiences with ingesting non-food substances would put you off of attempting something like this. Secondly, no one is going to love you until you stop doing things like trying to make them love you by eating mustard–sand.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“But as long as I figure out what’s going to happen before it actually happens—or hell, even while it’s happening—all the struggling and flailing might propel me away from it in time. Procrastination has become its own solution—a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success. A more troubling matter is the day-to-day activities that don’t have massive consequences when I neglect to do them.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“Nail clippers: As you may have noticed, trimming your nails is a traumatic event that requires three people, a beach towel, and a can of spray cheese.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“And because she is our dog, we can pick out the tiny, almost imperceptible good qualities from the ocean of terrible qualities, and we can cling to them. Because we want to love our dog.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“LOOK AT MEEE LOOK I own all the bananas now. Give me a dollar. Fuck you. Help me.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“I had spent my last feeling being disappointed that I couldn't rent Jumanji. (...) And thus began a tiny rebelion.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back. A fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn’t going to work.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“Because I can see the future and I know what will happen if I let you play with the lawn mower.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“When I encounter someone I haven’t seen in a while, I have never once thought, I should jump at them and poke their face with my fingers and keep doing that until someone locks me in the bathroom. Because that’s insane. What would you think if I did that to your dog friends?”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don’t email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me. Then the guilt from my ignored responsibilities grows so large that merely carrying it around with me feels like a huge responsibility. It takes up a sizable portion of my capacity, leaving me almost completely useless for anything other than consuming nachos and surfing the Internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“It wants to focus on being a good person, not just a barely not horrible one.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“My mom quickly tired of having to hold the cake out of my reach. She tried to hide the cake, but I found it almost immediately. She tried putting the cake on top of the refrigerator, but my freakish climbing abilities soon proved it to be an unsatisfactory solution.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“Nobody can guarantee that it’s going to be okay, but—and I don’t know if this will be comforting to anyone else—the possibility exists that there’s a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it’s just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“I seem to spend a lot of time being mildly disappointed by things that aren’t actually disappointing. They appear disappointing, though, because I’m constantly trying to be impressed or surprised by everything. I get a rush from encountering unexpectedly exceptional things. Even if I hate the thing, I still get a rush from discovering that it’s exceptionally bad. I could be injured and bleeding, but if I were bleeding a surprising amount, I would feel sort of excited about it.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“I haven’t figured out how to solve the problem in a normal way, but I did learn how to make myself feel so ashamed that I’m willing to take action.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game the I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to do . If I lose. I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“futile as trying to run away from lava in swim fins.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“Cake is the only thing that matters”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“Whenever I heard her retch in the backseat, I had to pull over as quickly as possible to prevent her from reloading her stomach and starting the whole cycle over again.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“I went and played with my toys, but I did not enjoy it.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don’t want to do. If I lose, I’m one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I’m going to win or lose until the last second.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“The human brain knows when it isn't ready to discover everything about itself, and there are a few emergency-emergency security measures in place to keep you safe in the event that you decide to go traipsing around in your deep brain-wilderness like a reckless idiot.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened