Adelle Waldman Quotes

#1. It was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison.

Adelle Waldman

#2. He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.

Adelle Waldman

#3. Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn't the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the "intuitive" also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick.

Adelle Waldman

#4. The belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was bestowed by the same invisible hand that ensured that the deli would have milk to drink and sandwiches to buy.

Adelle Waldman

#5. If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.

Adelle Waldman

#6. People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart
but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way of real thought.

Adelle Waldman

#7. At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential.

Adelle Waldman

#8. In a certain sense, it's harder for men to say no to sex than it is for women. When a woman says no, nobody's feelings are hurt. Men expect to be shot down. But when a man says no, the woman feels as if he's just said she's fat and undesirable. That makes him feel like a jerk.

Adelle Waldman

#9. When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.

Adelle Waldman

#10. Smart people only mated with smart people, class structures would ossify. There'd be a permanent underclass of stupid people.

Adelle Waldman

#11. Good drivers are people who can put their brains on cruise control.

Adelle Waldman

#12. What began, after a few more minutes, to irritate him was that she didn't even attempt to be engaging - made no effort toward wit or color in her replies. Only an attractive young woman would take for granted a stranger's interest in the minutiae of her life.

Adelle Waldman

#13. I'm sure a lot of it is my fault," he said. He smiled ruefully. "And by a lot, I mean all."
"Ah, the self-deprecating dude routine," Hannah said. " 'What a lovable fuck-up I am.' The annoying thing is that it makes you look good, but it doesn't get me anything.

Adelle Waldman