Kristen Roupenian Quotes

“But I guess that was the whole problem, at that point, my inability to deal with normal human interaction.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“So this was kissing. He had to admit Rachel seemed into it. She kept kind of rolling around and sighing. Would he be enjoying himself more if he were kissing Anna? Frankly, it was hard to ever imagine being turned on by this activity. Two boneless slabs of flesh, flopping around, like a pair of slugs mating in the cavern of your mouth. Gross, Ted. What was wrong with him?”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“When I try to reconstruct the place that I was, at that point in my life, to figure out how I got there, to that punch, to that bed, to that girl—I can't. I can see where some bad decisions led to some other bad decisions, but I can't get all the way there; it's like I imagine a curve, where I'm dropping lower and lower down, and then I'm off the radar screen, invisible, and then, after some time goes by, the line is rising, visible again, and I don't know what happened in between.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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?”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Fantasies were fantasies, but it was important to keep at least one foot in the realm of the real.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Lizzie is hapless about romance in an ironic, self-deprecating way.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“There are tears in her eyes. Ted has never seen her look so despondent, and Anna often looks very, very sad.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“I'm a nice guy, I swear to fucking God.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“What a fantastical place adulthood has turned out to be: with the power of social media and a thousand dollars, she's summoned Taylor's dream crush out of an ancient VHS tape and brought him here, to life.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Ted thought: I am probably not dying but I am scared and alone and I don't like this.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Ted thinks: Everyone at this party could die tonight, including me, and I wouldn't even care. He gets very drunk.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“What is wrong with me, that even this fucking loser won't give me what I want?”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“The way he looked at her? Imagine somebody looking at you like that.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“She wants what she wants," Kath says.

Don't we all?”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Kath experiences a moment of confused dislocation, as though her soul has suddenly relocated into her body from very far away.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Thinking about it too hard makes her angry: ardent Taylor, who wants more passionately than anyone Kath has ever met, deserves more than these insulting parodies of lust. But what does Taylor want?”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Her memory like a skipping record, bumping continually up against the scratch.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“The opportunities available to actors who achieved the peak of their fame as nameless characters in 1990s softcore horror porn films must be limited.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Frankly, the whole concept was a little too New Age—y for me.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“That was how I responded to beauty, in both women and men: drawn to it at first, and then recoiling. Ruled by my own shallow impulses, then angry at the trick.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“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.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This