Best 69 quotes of Kristen Roupenian on MyQuotes

After a few minutes, he decided that kissing wasn't that hard, really, although it certainly wasn't everything it was cracked up to be . . . He tried closing his eyes but it made him uncomfortable, like someone was going to sneak up behind him and plunge a knife into his back.

All I've ever wanted is to be loved. Well, to be worshiped. To be desired, madly and painfully, to the exclusion of all else. Is that so wrong?

And if she spent rather more time with her nose in a book than was considered ideal at that time (or any other), well, at least that meant she always had a story to tell.

And it would have been one thing, all of these suitors agreed, to have been rejected for a reason, but to be passed over simply because one was, in some vague way, not good enough—that was an unequivocal blow.

And she'd be panting underneath him and they'd fuck and he'd make her come so hard that afterward they would be together for the rest of their lives. It was a foolproof plan. Oh, wait. No it wasn't. It was a sexual fantasy, and he was an idiot.

And she did think Robert was cute. Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he'd sat across from her during a dull class.

And yet sometimes he'd lie awake at night imagining Rachel telling her story to a tribunal of all the girls who'd ever rejected him, regaling them about his deceptions, the way he'd pretended to like her when he didn't, the mask of 'niceness' he wore when the truth was he was a selfish, lying piece of shit—and he saw all those girls, Anna at their center, shocked but not shocked, nodding and agreeing that yes, of course, they'd known something was wrong with him all along.

Anna, are you asleep?" He imagined Anna lying awake, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling, her heart full of yearning, but there was only silence. "I love you, Anna," he whispered, and he hung up the phone.

Anna loves Ted, but she does not want him in a way that causes her to suffer; she does not want him desperately, despite herself. And it turns out that is how Ted has always wanted to be wanted: the way he has always wanted women. The way Anna wanted Marco, and he wanted Anna, and Rachel (or so it seems, in retrospect) wanted him. In the absence of this painful wanting, Ted has trouble getting hard.

As Anna poured her heart out over the phone, Ted's own heart lit up like a solar flare. He wanted nothing more than to show Anna how he saw her: how beautiful and perfect she was in his eyes. He needed to let her know that he was going to carry that memory—that knowledge—of her inside him, so that no matter what happened between them, no matter how down she got on herself, he could do this for her: he could love her, selflessly and unceasingly, with total commitment and purity, for the rest of his life. An hour later, Anna sniffled. 'Thank you for listening, Ted,' she said. 'It really means a lot to me.' I would die for you, Ted thought. 'No problemo,' Ted said.

. . . banishing his desires to the realm of the imagination, where they couldn't do any harm.

But he still wished Anna would do something to reassure him—ideally burst into tears and say, You were always there for me, always, and plead with him to forgive her for all her years of neglect—but he'd have settled for even a hint that she intended to make an active effort to meet up.

But I guess that was the whole problem, at that point, my inability to deal with normal human interaction.

But surely something had changed between them! Surely she wouldn't treat him, now, the way she had then, not after she'd spoken the words aloud: You were always there for me, always, but I never appreciated it, I always took you for granted.

Did he even exist in her mind, as a living, breathing, thinking person? He spent so much time trying to figure out what she was thinking, but what kind of a consciousness did she imagine lived behind the mask of his face?

Every so often, over the next day or so, she would find herself in a gray, daydreamy mood, missing something, and she'd realize that it was Robert she missed, not the real Robert but the Robert she'd imagined on the other end of all those text messages during break.

Fantasies were fantasies, but it was important to keep at least one foot in the realm of the real.

For the first time, Ted imagined fucking Anna the way he (almost) fucked Rachel: cruelly, without concern for her comfort, fully acknowledging that as much as he loved her, he hated her, too.

Frankly, the whole concept was a little too New Age—y for me.

Given how little contact Ted had now with actual Anna, it was like he was in a relationship with an imaginary friend.

He'd never empathized with Rachel more than he did in those moments, imagining what it would be like to be innocently eating lunch with a person who had been acting for all the world as though he liked you, who had given you no hint that anything was bothering him at all, when suddenly, out of nowhere, wham, it turned out you were completely wrong about him, and that everything he'd been telling you was a lie.

He felt ashamed of himself, of course, but the warmth of that shame pooled in his crotch, amplifying his pleasure.

He felt like something deep inside had broken. He'd asked for nothing; he'd tried to content himself with as little as it was possible to want. Yet here he was, feeling humiliated and small once again.

He had no faith in love's capacity to cause him anything but pain.

Her memory like a skipping record, bumping continually up against the scratch.

He unrequitedly loved Anna; Anna unrequitedly loved Marco; Marco probably unrequitedly loved some rando none of them had ever met. The world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.

I can't believe you called me," Anna said. "Nobody else from home has called me in forever. It's like they forgot about me. You think you're so close to people but when it comes down to it, they just forget.

I didn't mean to hurt anyone, he tries to tell them. I just wanted to be seen, and loved for who I am. The problem was, it was all a misunderstanding. I pretended to be a good person, and then I couldn't stop.

If I describe him to you in terms of hair, eye color, shape of face, the effect will be all wrong, because he was the living, breathing incarnation of my deepest desires, not yours. You must imagine your own naked man, and I will tell you only this: he was larger than I would have expected, more fully embodied, and that is only half a dirty joke. There was no prettiness about him, and nothing effeminate. Nothing angelic, either, so if that's what you had started to picture, start again.

I had done magic. Sometimes, when people in stories encounter the paranormal, they react with horror as the fabric of reality shreds and they are faced with the dawning recognition that everything they once believed was a lie. As I stared down at my phone, I had that exact feeling, except the opposite: not horror but a giddy, mounting joy. This was what all those books had promised. I knew it, I thought. I knew the world was more interesting than it was pretending to be.

I'm a nice guy, I swear to fucking God.

Why do you like me? Why can't you tell I'm not that into you?

I wish I could change everything about myself but it's just—it's too late to do anything, that's the problem. It's all so fucked up, and I just don't who I am anymore, you know? Like, who is this person who made all these choices that I just have to live with? I look back at that person and I hate her, I hate her so much for what she did to me, that person is like my nemesis, my worst enemy, but the problem is, that person is me.

Listen, listen. I can explain. There's a bad Ted underneath the good Ted, yes, but then, under that, there's a Ted who's good for real. But no one ever sees him; his whole life, no one ever has. Underneath it all, I'm just that kid who wanted nothing more than to be loved and didn't know how to make it happen, even though I tried and tried and tried.

Lizzie is hapless about romance in an ironic, self-deprecating way.

Margot thought: oh, no. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn't that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting they stop now, after everything she'd done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she'd ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.

Maybe I was wrong, Ted thought. Maybe I could be content with this. Unfortunately, he could not.

Oh, my God, Ted," she moaned, fakely. They dated for the next four months.

On the other hand, she happily kept him informed about plans she had with other people, providing a steady flow of information about excursions that were about to happen, details of dates or parties that were always this close to coming together. As long as he listened, without complaint, to an endless description of activities that were supposed to happen without him, there was a 30 percent chance, at least, that Anna would change her mind at the last minute, claim to be unable to handle the unbearable burden of whatever her social plans were supposed to be, and decide to hang out with him instead. She'd arrive at his house and collapse in exaggerated relief: "I am so glad we're doing this, I was so not in the mood for another party at Maria's." As though they were both equally at the mercy of circumstance, similarly oblivious to the power dynamic that governed their "friendship.

Perhaps the problem with adulthood was that you weighed the consequences of your actions too carefully, in a way that left you with a life you despised.

She can feel it scratching at her, her anger, wedged in the space where the two halves of her rib cage meet.

She'd been on the hunt for some badass dude who'd go down with her into whatever dark place she was trapped in, but instead she'd ended up with this lame-ass coward, a guy who's too fucked up to tell her to get lost, but also too scared to do what he said he would do.

She doesn't know what to call it—this free-falling sensation she feels every time she looks at Taylor, like her hands are closing again and again on emptiness—but she thinks she knows better than to call it love.

She puts her head on his shoulder, and for a second, it's like the other good night, the night of the bonfire, the brief lifting of the yoke, freedom from the circle: Marco hurting Anna, Anna hurting Ted, Ted hurting Rachel, these endless rounds of jealousy and harm.

. . . she thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marveled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who'd just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.

Still, she really did seem to be absurdly into this. It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.

Ted kisses Rachel with tongue and squeezes her ass. In doing so, he discovers that it is possible to enjoy something and yet not care about it in the slightest. He finds this sensation—feeling pleasure, and simultaneously feeling detached from the pleasure—to be, itself, quite pleasurable. He wonders if he has miraculously become a Buddhist, or suffered a psychotic break.

Ted thinks: Everyone at this party could die tonight, including me, and I wouldn't even care. He gets very drunk.

Ted thought: I am probably not dying but I am scared and alone and I don't like this.

Ted thought maybe he could start a fight about Shelly that could serve as a distraction. Or maybe he should just knock over the nearest video display and flee the state.