Apartment Quotes

“Remember this, I commanded myself again, though I knew that this memory--like all of them--would lose an essential and truthful quality over the years. The notion that we repress or redact significant chunks of the past strikes me as a dramatic contrivence for storytellers more than a realistic psychological phenonomen, but that we alter or retrospection in subtle ways, to airbrush out unpalatable flemishes here and there, much as we sweep detritus in our present consciousness under the carpet: that seems quite natural.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Sometimes the only way to start over in life is to burn down the house.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“There were no people or cars out; if not for the houses around me, I could have been in a forest. Something about the moment--likely my adolescent conviction that my pain had more beauty, more holiness, than the average person's, that it was exceptional and exquisite--compelled me to tell myself to memorialize it. I suppose it is this kind of egotistical delusion that drives some people to make art.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Should previous decades be defined by an article of clothing and an intoxicant—a gray flannel suit and a martini, tie-dye and marijuana, bell-bottoms and hallucinogens, shoulder pads and cocaine—the mid-nineties were relaxed-fit Gap jeans and light beer. An”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Order belongs to the wealthy," he said, and we both laughed because that was all we could afford to do.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“--her hand grazed the center of my back, testing to see if I was awake; the tentative gesture of someone in a foreign stranger's room, in the middle of the night...at an inflection point that could conceivably determine whether two people might someday get married or never see each other again, both of us lonely and longing for shelter.
I pretended to be asleep.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Until that point, I'd assumed that nearly everyone bore a certain amount of loneliness within them, it was just the human condition of being trapped inside one mind and body for a lifetime, so that whatever isolation I felt was normal and universal; but hearing Seger's lyrics, rather than identifying with someone else's expression of similar feelings, as art was supposed to do for its audience, I thought that there was a different quality to mine, it was singular and peculiar and grotesque, a lonely flavor of loneliness--but maybe, I also reasoned, that's what true loneliness was, its Tolstoyan uniqueness made it so, and the only way out was to define yours to someone else and hope they still accepted you, and the only lonelier fate than rejection was never exposing yourself to its possibility.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“...this was all we collectively had, we knew no protest songs, had little to protest--and I felt a swelling in my chest, a surge of joy flowering out through my limbs; there is nothing like crooning in a group to a chorus to communicate to yourselves and the world that you are young and drunk and unhindered by responsibility, that the future stretches out endlessly before you like a California highway.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Everyone thinks they're a fraud," he said. "Except for the actual frauds.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Though I suppose each experience like this, just like everyone's loneliness, feels uniquely uncategorizable—the particular contours of another person's borders that collide with your own before leaving behind a crater that will be there the rest of your life.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“The comments grew fanged, cataloging irksome details and turns of phrase, an uncensored focus group for a despised product.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“to be on the fringes of an already marginalized subculture is simply lonely.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment