I had a tumor. But it was great.

— David Rakoff

I'm not sure. But that bless-his/her-heart kind of melancholic humor is among my favorite things in the world. I guess it exposes a kind of humanity - or that's the hope, at least - a kind of grudging respect for human frailty. Unless it's actually kicking human frailty while it's down - I'm not sure.

— David Rakoff

Is there some lesson on how to be friends? I think what it means is that central to living life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact regardless of whether we kiss, or we wound. Still, we must come together. Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more--since it beats staying dry but so lonely on shore. So we make ourselves open while knowing full wellie's essentially saying "please, come pierce my shell.

— David Rakoff

It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Radio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone's eyes focus upon you. And then shift away.

— David Rakoff

Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell.

— David Rakoff

One day Satan himself visits, along with his great-grandmother—who is, not surprisingly, a total fucking bitch.

— David Rakoff

The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone.

— David Rakoff

There is much in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulate, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration-free, amateur-porn chanteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothing more on its mind than servitude to Mammon and celebrity at any cost, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

— David Rakoff

There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.

— David Rakoff

There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it’s really true: I should have stayed home.

— David Rakoff