I Wrote This Book Because I Love You Quotes

“if you want to enjoy the rewards of being loved, you also have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“Of course no one is the Right Person when you meet her; this is just an illusion necessary to lure you into investing the years and making the sacrifices necessary to love someone. It's like telling yourself your book is going to be a masterpiece and make you rich in order to undertake the laborious ordeal of writing it. It's only after making all those compromises and forfeitures, and amassing a shared fortune in memories, regrets, in-jokes and secrets, fights and reconciliations, that that person becomes the only possible one for you, unique and irreplaceable.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“God, how I long to go out west again someday—to drive some blue highway in Nevada or Utah until there’s absolutely nothing around me, then stop the car, in the middle of the road, maybe, and get out and just stand there, where I can see from one horizon to the other, and smell the air and feel the sun and listen to the silence of the desert. I have this idea that if I could do this, time might hold still for a second, and I would know, for just a moment, what it feels like to be here.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“we are happiest living our lives this way—saying I love you and kissing each other good-bye in the morning, venturing out into the uncaring world to have all kinds of adventures, then returning home to share our daily pocketful of collected anecdotes and complaints.15”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“How it could make Diana happy to be around me was mysterious to me, since I was always around me and I was never happy. We always forget the Heisenberg effect of our own presence—that we only ever get to see what other people are like when we're around. I'd been drawn to her hoping I might absorb some of her radiance, not realizing it was, in part, my own reflected light. 197”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“The last thing I'd want to be accused of is "growing up"; this is how boring conventional people congratulate you when your spirit breaks. 173”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“This world operates according to rules I was not around to vote on; marriages seems like on of those institutions that everybody agrees on but almost on one actually wants, like jobs, wars, or Christmas. In fact, I'd always resented monogamy for the same reason I hat Christmas shopping: if something's obligatory, it isn't a gift. 87”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“Young people don’t say the new normal anymore; to them it’s just normal. But I guess no one finds themselves in the same country they were born in at the ends of their lives. We all die in exile.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“I waited for years for my infatuation to blow over, managing it like a chronic illness. But suppression only sustains and intensifies passion instead of letting it peter out into domesticity, the way the narrow glass canyons of Manhattan Venturi the winds to a pitch that rips umbrellas inside out. Kati Jo used to say she wished Lauren and I could just fuck so I'd get it out of my system, but I never wanted anything as feasible as an affair. I never imagined that Lauren might leave her husband, or entertained shameful little daydreams about his death. The only scenario I could plausibly picture that would bring us together was not Lars's death but my own. I would contract some painless terminal illness that would entitle me to ask Lauren to sit at my bedside in my last months and read to me or bring me little sandwiches. I couldn't envision any realistic way of changing this world; what I wanted was to live in a different one. I was never really a reformer, but a utopian.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“Maybe the moral is, nothing works. 98”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“This world operates according to rules I was not around to vote on; marriages seems like on of those institutions that everybody agrees on but almost on one actually wants, like jobs, wars, or Christmas. In fact, I'd always resented monogamy for the same reason I hate Christmas shopping: if something's obligatory, it isn't a gift. 87”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“At a time in my life when writing had become as fulfilling as doing my taxes, and about as remunerative … 156”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“Domesticity dampens desire. 91”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“even in our late forties, we get to be the glamorous young couple on board, like newlyweds on honeymoon. Human beings never were more lovely, more perfect in motion.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“Like many men, I am tormented by the delusion that for every attractive woman I see there is some hypothetical sequence of events that will lead to me having sex with her, and end up damning myself a coward and a failure the 99.999907 percent of the time this fails to happen.
Except how many times have I ever actually gone to a party or a bar and ended up getting the number of/making out with/going home with someone I met there? Even on the rare occasions when this has happened, there have been moments when it's occurred to me that it's three a.m., and I'm tired, and this is all getting to be rather a lot of work, and in truth I might've been happier watching a movie with a cat on my lap. It's the tantalizing possibility of sex - reinforced, like an addiction to the nickel slots, by the rare, sporadic payoff - that gives life its luster.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays