Long Island Compromise Quotes

“There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“There are few things more validating than to see someone who is like you, and love them instead of hate them.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“There is no post. There’s only trauma.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“In the first pew, Beamer and Jenny couldn’t move. They had watched all this, as the understanding of what had really gone wrong in their lives revealed itself to them, which was that the tide pool you’re born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons. Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see normal people. But the alternative was true, as well. What bonded them was what they alone had seen. But what evaded them was what they hadn’t. That was what Jenny thought right then, and when she truly understood it, it found her breathless: that if you don’t know to do the things that the Semanskys were doing it’s because that was an inheritance, too. If you never saw it, you couldn’t have it—no, if you never saw it, you couldn’t even know that you were supposed to want it.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“How can you get over anything if it all is just constantly happening?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“I think if everyone is traumatized, then no one is traumatized.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“Everything was its parts; nothing was its sum.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“It hurt the way the sunshine or a cool drink of water hurts when you hate yourself.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“How the generation who worked and fought for our ability to live how we wanted to would be shocked to see not a painter, or a poet, or a concert violinist, or even a philosophy professor among us.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“What is the word for when you know everyone is taking something too seriously, that the way it’s taking over your life isn’t normal, that it’s a little ridiculous, that it’s clearly what a bunch of rich kids stuck in a decade of ivory tower schooling need in order to think of themselves as real, living people? What is the word for the displaced energy of young people chained to academia when every atom in your body is begging you to join the world? What is the word for when you think that, truly, but then start to have those beliefs replaced with earnestness?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“Maybe that was the real Long Island Compromise, that you can be successful on your own steam or you can be a basket case, and whichever you are is determined by the circumstances into which you were born. Your poverty will create a great drive in your children. Or your wealth will doom them into the veal that Jenny described at her science fair, people who are raised to never be able to support a life so that when they’re finally allowed to wander outside their cages for the first time on their way to their slaughter, they can’t even stand up on their own legs. But the people who rise to success on their own never stop feeling the fear at the door, and the people lucky enough to be born into comfort and safety never become fully realized people in the first place. And who is to say which is better? No matter which way it is for you, it is a system that fucks you in the ass over and over, in perpetuity, and who is to say which is better?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“You don’t actually talk about things you know about people; you just live with the knowledge and allow it to ride quietly in the backseat of your relationship.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“They had watched all this, as the understanding of what had really gone wrong in their lives revealed itself to them, which was that the tide pool you’re born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons. Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see normal people. But the alternative was true, as well. What bonded them was what they alone had seen. But what evaded them was what they hadn’t. That was what Jenny thought right then, and when she truly understood it, it found her breathless: that if you don’t know to do the things that the Semanskys were doing it’s because that was an inheritance, too. If you never saw it, you couldn’t have it—no, if you never saw it, you couldn’t even know that you were supposed to want it.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“had become so afraid to commit to anything—to express an opinion, to sign up for anything long-term, to buy any clothing that made any kind of statement about herself, lest she find herself boxed in on something she wasn’t wholly sure of yet—that she found herself incapable of showing up anywhere as human being enough to attract another. She didn’t have many friends at Brown, or any, really; friends, too, require a declaration of some sort, and she just wasn’t willing to do it. You have to join a club (but what club?). You have to go to a game (but are you a game-going person?). You have to have a passion and an interest, and as time went on, she found all such exploration—despite what she said in her own defense to that counselor—a waste of time as she began to feel time breathing down her neck. She went on a couple of dates with a few guys she met in classes or at the V-Dub, but no one serious, since the exposure of only her negative spaces and not her positive, active ones created a self-consciousness that stymied her. On the rare occasions she had sex with someone, she wouldn’t make a sound, then be so disgusted by her own participation—the way her body reacted to someone else’s desire, or its own—that she would spend the postcoital period not admitting to even having been there during the act: “Was it good for you?” “Was what good for me?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“He stood with his foot on the neck of his brother’s pain. He liked how it made him taller and taller.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“But Beamer and Charlie never discussed Beamer’s father’s kidnapping directly. You don’t actually talk about things you know about people; you just live with the knowledge and allow it to ride quietly in the backseat of your relationship.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“The Fletchers persisted, a beacon of what a person should hope for their family, arm in arm in lockstep down the pathways of happiness and prosperity. The problem is that they didn’t stop to consider what the rest of us knew, which was that they had no right to set the conditions for safety and survival in the first place—that safety and survival might not work that way. They don’t care about you. They don’t accrue like an Israel bond. The more you bank on them as investments that feed off themselves, the more precarious and insidious their yields. But what are you going to do? That’s how rich people are.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“But he didn’t get on that escalator. Instead, he walked toward the subway and went through the turnstile and got on the microbe spore biodome coaster that was the 1 train and headed downtown to Houston Street. There, he alighted, trudging up the stairs.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“We comfort ourselves that perhaps the phantom limbs of their potential tingle enough to tell them that they missed their opportunity to rise from their comfortable circumstances and become the real people that only true adversity and fear can make you into. Genes can lie dormant, but they don't dilute even the recessive ones stand backstage in full dress, waiting for their turn to go on.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“people who rise to success on their own never stop feeling the fear at the door, and the people lucky enough to be born into comfort and safety never become fully realized people in the first place. And who is to say which is better? No matter which way it is for you, it is a system that fucks you in the ass over and over, in perpetuity, and who is to say which is better?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“No matter which way it is for you, it is a system that fucks you in the ass over and over, in perpetuity, and who is to say which is better?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“She had been locked in a debate with herself her whole life about how to be good in the world, and the only thing she left out of that very private conversation she was having was the actual work of being a nice, normal human being.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“the tide pool you’re born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“He was in a vault, he was a prisoner, he was unaware of the state of the world, controlled by a rigid set of someone else’s set of expectations.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“Do you understand that I spend my whole life doing things that will make me able to function as a normal person for you?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“I’m organizing this hunger strike that started today, but apparently it’s too much so the students are taking shifts not eating.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“He was a nice guy, the kind of father who knows a lot of trivia and can always find a quarter behind the ear of a child.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“God, she was so full of shit she couldn’t bear it.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“At the bottom of your lies, when you cannot swim down farther because there is no farther to swim down, the brain finds optimism.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise

“Happiness just…It’s fine. It means that I’m never unhappy, because I don’t live in a paradigm in which happiness is at one end of a spectrum. If it doesn’t exist, it can’t be on the agenda.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise