Wow, No Thank You. Quotes

“First of all, why you would ask a man anything is beyond me.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Hello, 911? I’ve been lying awake for an hour each night, reliving a two-second awkward experience I had in front of a casual acquaintance three years ago, for eight months.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Loving yourself is a full-time job with shitty benefits. I'm calling in sick.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“Everyone thinks I’m going to eventually die of a heart attack, but joke’s on y’all—it’s definitely going to be of secondhand embarrassment.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“I don’t have good processing skills—at least I don’t think I do, because I turn everything into a fucking joke and then bury it in a shallow grave in whatever part of the mind something you never want to think about ever again goes…until its decomposing hand emerges from the dirt on a random Tuesday at 3 a.m. to remind you of that embarrassing thing you thought you’d forgotten.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Hello, 911? My friend just left me a voice mail.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“if there is a cream strong enough to counteract the existential dread woven through every cell in my body, I’d buy it.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Leading people on is a hate crime. Especially when you could just say what you want and let them decide whether or not they want to give it to you without getting their romantic feelings involved.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“A handy trick is to think long and hard about what the person who hates you would realistically add to your life if they were to actually be a part of it. Most people really do have absolutely nothing to offer you.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“I approach most endeavors with zero expectations, which is a skill I have honed after forty years of fairly regular disappointment.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“Hello, 911? I am the first person at this party.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“My head hurts, so I either have a brain tumor or I haven’t had enough caffeine today.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“When is the last time an actual human interaction made you laugh more than a meme did?”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“The closer I creep toward the precipice of forty, the more time I spend listening to the same songs I listened to in high school and combing through surprisingly vivid memories of my time there, which is wild, because I did not actually have a good time being young!”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Showing up at a restaurant and hoping for the best is a young person’s game. If I’m going out, I need to know that there is a table with my name on it and a comfortable seat pulled up to it. I’m too old to hover anxiously near the door, sweating under my coat in my good outside clothes, watching people who actually planned ahead be ushered to their awaiting tables and served the foods I am dying to eat.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Settling” is a coarse way of saying “adjusting my expectations,” and I think that gets a bad rap. Dude, I would rather settle than be “chronically unfulfilled due to my outsize desires.” I don’t mean that you should marry someone you hate just because they won’t go away, but I do think it’s worth examining what you actually want while being honest about what is important to you. Then it won’t feel like such a compromise, you know? On top of that, it’s totally unfair to make a flesh-and-bone person compete against an imaginary ideal that was imprinted on you when you were too young to understand what was happening. Shit, growing up I wanted to marry the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. A strong, virile creature who read tons of books and could fuck up a wolf ? Yes please! Sign me up! I could’ve lain awake every night waiting for Mufasa to save me from a wildebeest stampede in a gorge, but do I climb into bed next to a fucking lion? No, bitch, because I am realistic. Instead, I married this person who makes her own kombucha and charges her crystals under the new moon. Girl, adapt!”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Hello, 911? Why did this woman choose the middle stall in this three-stall public bathroom?”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Sadly, life is not a movie. Life is an impossibly long and unyielding march to the grave, peppered along the way with myriad disappointments and misfortunes.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“I do not knock on Fiona’s door when I’m trying to have an upbeat good time; I am coming to her with the shattered pieces of my heart in my hands, setting the pointy shards at her feet, and lying very still until she stomps on them with her words.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“am a high-functioning depressed and anxious person. I know it can manifest in myriad ways, but mine are these: (1) extreme inertia, but never at the expense of my employment, so mostly bailing on friends who want to hang out and feeling extremely apathetic toward doing “fun” things that aren’t lying very still; (2) self-soothing with food, though never in shocking amounts, mostly just staring into the void while eating ice cream over the sink, then realizing, “oops, the pint is finished”; (3) fear of trying new things or venturing out of a comfort zone, clinging to childhood demons as a means of never actually having to move forward; (4) blistering resentment for the outwardly happy and seemingly well-adjusted.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“I first heard Pearl Jam in the seventh grade, when this kid I didn’t know very well was brandishing a copy of Ten on cassette in our language arts class. I asked to borrow it and took it home and held a tape recorder up to the speaker in our living room for an hour to record it. (This, sweet babies, is my version of “in my day, we used to have to walk up a hill to get to school with plastic bags for shoes!” Please kill me.)”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“I’m forty now, and the hilarious thing about being forty is this: I don’t know anything. Before you try to convince me otherwise or try to make me feel better, you should know that I know that YOU’RE forty and trying to reassure yourself that YOU know something. You don’t!”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever had a favorite contestant on Top Chef?”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“Why has age made me better at so few things?”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“My lady and I were out getting hammered at the local watering hole on a weeknight and feeling like cool olds, when the waiter asked if it was “moms’ night out,” while offering to explain to us what whiskey is. And now I’m a corpse—please bury me in my L.L.Bean comfort fleece. ME: “Excuse me, I have tattoos, Jeff.” “Oh my goodness, ma’am, I’m so sorry, I just saw the fluid collecting at your ankles and assumed—” HIM: What the fuck is happening to my life? What vibe am I giving off ? Yes, I am wearing soft, pull-on, straight-leg Gloria Vanderbilts, but I also have cool glasses and a motherfucking hand tattoo. Couldn’t it just be middle school art teachers’ happy hour, Jeff ?!”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“What the fuck do I even talk about all day, 1099s and full-coverage underpants? LIKE, FOR REAL, WHO EVEN CARES? JUST POINT ME TOWARD THE SUN AND WATER ME OCCASIONALLY.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“It’s possible that they were coming over to offer me homemade bread or a hand-drawn map to all the local breweries or perhaps even their friendship, but I will never know, because I’m from Chicago and I don’t believe in answering an unsolicited door knock.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Back when I had feelings, my self-esteem was a toilet. It caused me actual physical pain to know that someone didn’t like me. I mean, it still does, but I’m better insulated by drugs these days.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever given a crying baby back to its parent?”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever pooped on a reliable schedule?”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays