Really Good, Actually Quotes

“No adult starts a hobby from a good place.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“It doesn't have to be some big conspiracy. It doesn't have to be special. It can be just bad.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“One day,” she said, “and it will surprise you how soon this day will come, but one day you will wake up and feel good. It won’t last long, but then you’ll have another day where you barely remember this abjection, and another, and another, until that’s just your life. But for now, it will be hard. This is the part that’s hard.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“When you say that you feel you’ll never find another person willing to be in a long-term relationship with you, that makes me feel very personally sad. I wonder if we might ask whether you are willing to be in a long-term relationship with yourself?”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“you don’t have to say everything you think and feel to everyone around you all the time. Even if you want to. You can keep it to yourself. Sometimes, that feels better.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“You need to practice walking around and living life and being heartbroken at the same time.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“It is horrible to be sad in the summer.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“I sighed at the thought of all the unsexy time ahead: nights in with my thoughts and feelings, earnest efforts at knowing and possibly (ugh) loving myself, the utter hassle and enormous privilege of deciding what I wanted to do with my life, my weekends, my heart.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“Every time I ate a dessert-themed yogurt, I felt like a stupid little bitch.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“Even if we handle it as well as possible, I thought, it’s still going to be terrible.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“I’m only suicidal on Mondays.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“Not sleeping was less concerning; no one sleeps well anymore. The world is falling apart, and our phones are just there, glowing in our faces, full of news about what the president has said and which of our exes have recently gotten haircuts.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“finding joy in the mundanity of life.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“One day and it will surprise you how soon this day will come, but one day you will wake up and feel good. It won’t last long, but then you’ll have another day where you barely remember this abjection, and another, and another, until that’s just your life. But for now, it will be hard. This is the part that’s hard.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“You’ll like dating, everyone eats ass now.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“I had worked so hard to get my head above water, only to look around and discover I was in the big, freaky ocean, alone.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“I hope you’re taking care of yourself.” I told Merris I was practicing all the self-care I could handle. She scoffed. “Please. I don’t mean your moon rocks or whatever you’ve done that got oil all over everything down here. That’s fine; so is the messaging. But at a certain point it becomes running, when most of moving on is just getting out of bed and plodding forward. Call it what you must, but you need to practice walking around and living life and being heartbroken at the same time. Not in an exciting way, where you’re in the thrall of some new person, or buying something outrageous, or terrorizing Jiro, but in the way you still have to go to work when you have a toothache.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“It’s really starting to piss me off that the division of our entwined lives can be like, a non-event for you and an enormous administrative chore for me.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“I know what I want long term, but sometimes in the moment you really need to know someone has never seen anything better than your ass.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“He said the outcome of marriage, best case scenario, was one of you finding the other’s corpse.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually: A Novel

“the shame that would rise in me every few hours like acid reflux”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually: A Novel

“An underwhelming breakup. No affair; no big, blowout moment. Just a series of small fires that we let burn out around us, clutching our coffees like the dog from the internet: this is fine.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“I thought about next year, how I had no idea what it would be like, who I would meet, what they would do.
Things would happen to me, and I would make decisions, and sometimes they would work out and sometimes they wouldn't. It would carry on like that, over and over, until ideally, I got incredibly old and died in my sleep, maybe with somebody nice nearby, or a cat that would definitely eat part of my face, but what would I care, I'd be drifting around in that endless nothing space I could not think about for too long without becoming sweat-drenched and queasy. It was a funny idea, my existing for years and years, shit happening all over the place, everything seeming so Big and Meaningful. And it was, but also it wasn't. I would feel one way for a while, and then I would feel another way, and it would never be forever, because nothing is.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“and although my personal life was in a shambles, my tweets about it were doing great”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“I think most intelligent people are a little bit mean, and all nice people are a little bit stupid.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“The truth is, if you start your eating disorder even slightly overweight, no one will notice until things are very much at the ‘what if two meals a day were soup’ stage.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“He still hasn’t answered your email? Men are trash. Every single man alive is a pile of actual trash.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“I woke the next morning to a text from my sister: mom says we have to check on you, apparently you’re having some kind of breakdown.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“another, I looked like shit and was sad all the time.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually

“You’ve been so generous,” I told her. “I wish I’d been a better friend to you.”
“Oh, Maggie,” she said. “We’re not friends. We’re just two people having a hard time.”
― Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually