Samantha Irby Quotes

First of all, why you would ask a man anything is beyond me.

I am a negative person by nature, and I typically shy away from anything that requires me to be having visible fun.

Hello, 911? I’ve been lying awake for an hour each night, reliving a two-second awkward experience I had in front of a casual acquaintance three years ago, for eight months.

Loving yourself is a full-time job with shitty benefits. I'm calling in sick.

I don't know what an attractive personality is. I like charisma and charm, but what I really need to find is someone who doesn't get on my nerves but is also minimally annoyed by all the irritating things about me.

But no, I came by these feelings honestly. And I don’t accept bitter. Wounded, yes. Traumatized, sure. Grieving, okay. Anything other than bitter. I put too much work in to be callously tossed aside as bitter. Bitter is for someone who hasn’t earned it.

Everyone thinks I’m going to eventually die of a heart attack, but joke’s on y’all—it’s definitely going to be of secondhand embarrassment.

I feel my sexiness is a thing that creeps up on you, like mold on a loaf of corner-store bread you thought you'd get three more days out of.

Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, 'Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and i got you some while i was out', as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table. It's not a game you don't understand the rules of, or a test you never got the materials to study for. It never leaves you wondering who could possibly be texting at 3 am. Or what you could possibly do to make it come home and stay there. It's fucking boring, dude. I don't walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store. No checking her emails or calling her job to make sure she's actually there. No sitting in my car outside her house at dawn, to make sure she's alone when she leaves. This feels safe, and steadfast, and predictable. And secure. It's boring as shit. And it's easily the best thing I've ever felt.

Hello, 911? My friend just left me a voice mail.

if there is a cream strong enough to counteract the existential dread woven through every cell in my body, I’d buy it.

But I was 22 when I started this job, and you know what? Sometimes it really is okay to just have a fucking job. Not a passion, not a career, but a steadfast source of bi-weekly income deposited directly into a checking account from which food, and medicine, and apps one totally forgot about having downloaded will be paid for.

Leading people on is a hate crime. Especially when you could just say what you want and let them decide whether or not they want to give it to you without getting their romantic feelings involved.

Never again will I be with someone who is unwilling to accept me as I am, or who has any desire to mold me into something that makes me uncomfortable.

I approach most endeavors with zero expectations, which is a skill I have honed after forty years of fairly regular disappointment.

Hello, 911? I am the first person at this party.

You know what makes me happy? Unexpected phone calls in the middle of the day. Remembering what I liked at that one restaurant we went to that one time. Half-dead grocery store flowers just because they were on sale. A good morning text that says, “have a good day and try not to burn anything to the ground in a furious rage.

A handy trick is to think long and hard about what the person who hates you would realistically add to your life if they were to actually be a part of it. Most people really do have absolutely nothing to offer you.

My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m. First thing I do is check to make sure I'm not dead. If I am, in fact, still alive, I usually sob uncontrollably until there's nothing left in my tear ducts but salt dust, then grope blindly through my apartment to the bathroom, where I say a little prayer for a hole to open beneath my building and swallow us all.

My head hurts, so I either have a brain tumor or I haven’t had enough caffeine today.

When is the last time an actual human interaction made you laugh more than a meme did?

No one ever tells attractive children how much they suck, and then the rest of us get stuck with insufferable, narcissistic adults who can barely tie their shoes because someone else is busy either doing it for them or congratulating them on their effort. I

What have you not found but would like to have in a relationship? Someone who will leave me the hell alone for extended periods of time without getting all weird about it. I have a lot of audiobooks to listen to on the toilet.

I don’t have good processing skills—at least I don’t think I do, because I turn everything into a fucking joke and then bury it in a shallow grave in whatever part of the mind something you never want to think about ever again goes…until its decomposing hand emerges from the dirt on a random Tuesday at 3 a.m. to remind you of that embarrassing thing you thought you’d forgotten.

I am a simple person. Kind of. I mean, I don’t really have any dreams beyond comfortable pants and unlimited sparkling water.

I'm not bitter, I survived a liar. I'm not bitter, I weathered a cheater. I'm not bitter, I sustained a massive injury to the giant, bloody muscle in the center of my chest that is responsible for pumping blood through my entire body.

Maybe in life you get all kinds of soulmates. Multiple people who vibrate at the same level you do. I think that's what Fred is for me. I just don't get to see his penis anymore. So, no, I don't get my happy-ending tongue kiss in the rain, but I did get my friend back. And I don't have to worry about running these busted knees around after any babies.

Sadly, life is not a movie. Life is an impossibly long and unyielding march to the grave, peppered along the way with myriad disappointments and misfortunes.

Hello, 911? Why did this woman choose the middle stall in this three-stall public bathroom?

These kids are going to find out real quick that my perceived intelligence is a web of lies built on a crumbling foundation of charm and quick wit.

I want to ride a camel to the club and valet that shit.

but there I was, trying to fit the ocean into a plastic cup as it tossed and turned me in its waves.

Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, “Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and I got you some while I was out,” as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table.

The closer I creep toward the precipice of forty, the more time I spend listening to the same songs I listened to in high school and combing through surprisingly vivid memories of my time there, which is wild, because I did not actually have a good time being young!

Maybe in this life you get all kinds of soulmates, multiple people who vibrate at the same level you do.

Being perceived is excruciating, especially if you can't go person to person explaining why you look like that. I'd go to a lot more stuff if I knew I could take each person aside and explain to them why I look and dress the way I do.

I do not knock on Fiona’s door when I’m trying to have an upbeat good time; I am coming to her with the shattered pieces of my heart in my hands, setting the pointy shards at her feet, and lying very still until she stomps on them with her words.

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever had a favorite contestant on Top Chef?

I wasn’t sure how to appropriately eulogize a dude who had once punched me in the face for washing the dishes wrong,

You know, what I really need is someone who remembers to rotate this meaty pre-corpse toward the sun every couple of days and tries to get me to stop spending my money like a goddamn NBA lottery pick.

Not being able to deal with your life is humiliating. It makes you feel weak. And if you’re African-American and female, not only are you expected to be resilient enough to just take the hits and keep going, but if you can’t, you’re a Black Bitch with an Attitude. You’re not mentally ill; you’re ghetto.

Showing up at a restaurant and hoping for the best is a young person’s game. If I’m going out, I need to know that there is a table with my name on it and a comfortable seat pulled up to it. I’m too old to hover anxiously near the door, sweating under my coat in my good outside clothes, watching people who actually planned ahead be ushered to their awaiting tables and served the foods I am dying to eat.

But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed. When I am blasting “More and More” by Blood Sweat & Tears at seven on a Sunday morning while cleaning the kitchen and fucking up your mom’s frittata recipe. When I bring a half dozen gross, mangled kittens home to foster for a few nights and they shit everywhere and pee on your side of the bed. When I go “grocery shopping” and come back with only a bag of Fritos and five pounds of pork tenderloin. When I’m sick and stumbling around the crib with half a roll of toilet paper shoved in each nostril. When I beg you fourteen times to read something I’ve written, then get mad when you tell me what you don’t like about it and I call you an uneducated idiot piece of shit. Lovebird city.

Oh, here’s something fun—I don’t care what diet you’re on or what herbal supplements you take. If they work for you, I’m happy. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or if people walk around just dispensing unfounded medical advice to everyone they’ve ever met with a health issue, but more often than I’m comfortable with, some asshole with a high school diploma wants to sit me down and talk at me about how they can cure my wretched-gut disease.

Why has age made me better at so few things?

What the fuck do I even talk about all day, 1099s and full-coverage underpants? LIKE, FOR REAL, WHO EVEN CARES? JUST POINT ME TOWARD THE SUN AND WATER ME OCCASIONALLY.

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever pooped on a reliable schedule?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever given a crying baby back to its parent?

Back when I had feelings, my self-esteem was a toilet. It caused me actual physical pain to know that someone didn’t like me. I mean, it still does, but I’m better insulated by drugs these days.

Fifty out of the 168 hours of my week are spent mad because work is interfering with all the Internet articles I’m trying to read, forty-nine are spent trying to get some sleep if I’m lucky, ten are spent suffering through some sort of commuting nightmare, eight are pure panicking, eleven are brooding, and the last forty are eating shitting writing reading watching wishing hoping and hating.

I’m forty now, and the hilarious thing about being forty is this: I don’t know anything. Before you try to convince me otherwise or try to make me feel better, you should know that I know that YOU’RE forty and trying to reassure yourself that YOU know something. You don’t!

I was trying to fill this gaping hole inside me with “stuff I couldn’t have when I was a little kid,” and I assumed that one day, when I had finally bought enough magazines and name- brand snack foods to feel caught up, the feeling would go away. But it hasn’t. And because I know the value of a dollar, when I get one, I want to buy the nicest thing I can with it. I’m still buying hardcover books and department-store mascara, still daydreaming about what I’m going to spend my 401(k) on when I withdraw that shit early,

It's so weird that adults in committed relationships have a problem with something so innocuous as flirting. I would never expect you to walk around with a paper bag over your head to avoid catching the eye of a stranger, nor would I discourage you making friendly conversation with whomever you might encounter during the day. And if you needed to fuck somebody else, we could talk about it. People change, our desires evolve, and it feels foolish to me to expect what you'll want two, five, or ten years from now will be exactly the same thing that fills you up today. I mean, the way I feel about fidelity has evolved over the last ten years of my life. It's a hard-and-fast rule that we don't apply to any other thing in our lives: YOU MUST LOVE THIS [SHOW/BOOK/FOOD/SHIRT] WITH UNWAVERING FERVOR FOR THE REST OF YOUR NATURAL LIFE. Could you imagine being forced to listen to your favorite record from before your music tastes were refined for the rest of your life? Right now I'm pretty sure I could listen to Midnight Snack by HOMESHAKE for the rest of my life, but me ten years ago was really into acoustic Dave Matthews, and I'm not sure how I feel about that today. And yes, I am oversimplifying it, but really, if in seven years you want to have sex with the proverbial milkman, just let me know about it beforehand so I can hide my LaCroix and half eaten wedge of port salut. ('Milkmen' always eat all the good snacks.)

It’s possible that they were coming over to offer me homemade bread or a hand-drawn map to all the local breweries or perhaps even their friendship, but I will never know, because I’m from Chicago and I don’t believe in answering an unsolicited door knock.

I first heard Pearl Jam in the seventh grade, when this kid I didn’t know very well was brandishing a copy of Ten on cassette in our language arts class. I asked to borrow it and took it home and held a tape recorder up to the speaker in our living room for an hour to record it. (This, sweet babies, is my version of “in my day, we used to have to walk up a hill to get to school with plastic bags for shoes!” Please kill me.)

Showing up at a restaurant and hoping for the best is a young person’s game.

Like every other poor kid with sick or addicted parents, I knew that I needed to make myself small, that my problems should remain my problems only.

...it dawned on me the other day that, for me, the Internet has to be a meticulously curated digital space in which your uncle's vaguely racist tweets have no place.

I got this Aesop mouthwash that feels like it’s doing something to my neglected, gingivitis-ravaged gumline every time I swish it around, so that’s something. That I can do.

Mixtapes were the love language of my youth. If you got one from me, that shit was as serious as a marriage proposal.

I’m not cheap, and I love flushing money down the toilet, but nothing brings the “child, that’s just overpriced Vaseline” out of me quicker than the skincare counter at Saks.

Convenience is the number one driver of everything I do.

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever been to Trader Joe’s right after a restock?

Favorite food? Brunch and tacos.

Carnivore in the streets, person-who-has-eaten-a-carrot-masquerading-as-a-hot-dog in the sheets.

My friend John runs a foot fetish porn site called Feetishes™, and when he told me about it, I wasn’t grossed out or anything, because I would masturbate to two grandfathers fucking at a bus stop.

Because I feel like if I’m still bothering to wash my hair and take a multivitamin once in a while and read an old issue of Newsweek at the doctor’s office then I haven’t let go, I’ve just loosened my grip.

The Bachelorette proves that men are as petty and vapid and ridiculous as women are made to seem. They’re just better at hiding it, because they get to be Real Men and sulk and brood and bottle everything up.

I want to push back against this idea that it's not real love if you're not passionately chattering at each other all the time, that it's just as valid (and romantic!) to know instinctively when to shut the fuck up.

Don’t you wish you’d had a kid?” Do I wish I could stand idly by and witness all the things I hate about myself manifested in, and mirrored back to me by, a person it’s against the law for me to kill? I absolutely do not!

once read one of these profiles where the woman featured talked about alkalizing her body at the start of the day with lemon water, and I am being 100 percent sincere when I say that sentences like that fucking mystify me.

If I ever have more than $37 in my pocket I´m going to open a school for girls with bad attitudes where we basically talk to therapists all day while wearing soft pants and occasionally taking a field trip to the nearest elote cart.

It’s extremely hard to motivate myself to get to a place where I’m required to pay a twenty-dollar cover to get hip-checked by linebackers in church shoes all night, especially when I could just get back in my warm bed and NOT DO THAT.

HOSTILE is how I would describe my public personality; I am mild-mannered and super polite, but just beneath the surface of my skin, my blood is electrified and I am one inconsiderate driver away from a full Falling Down–style emotional collapse.

I really wish I was the type of person who owned a Prius and didn’t work fifty hours a week and could spend time in the grocery store reading labels to make sure that there isn’t a drop of gelatin or honey in every single thing I put in my cart at Whole Foods.

I feel like every medical professional I talk to is two degrees from saying “you’re too fat” no matter what you’ve made an appointment for them to check. I don’t know the correlation between gummy ears and weight, but if you give a doctor enough latitude, they will find one.

A lot of us are living like this, right? Taking cabs and ordering takeout Thai on payday, then walking the three blocks to work from the train with a bologna sandwich in our bags a week or so later? How does anyone do anything? Or, better than that, how does anyone do both the shit

am a high-functioning depressed and anxious person. I know it can manifest in myriad ways, but mine are these: (1) extreme inertia, but never at the expense of my employment, so mostly bailing on friends who want to hang out and feeling extremely apathetic toward doing “fun” things that aren’t lying very still; (2) self-soothing with food, though never in shocking amounts, mostly just staring into the void while eating ice cream over the sink, then realizing, “oops, the pint is finished”; (3) fear of trying new things or venturing out of a comfort zone, clinging to childhood demons as a means of never actually having to move forward; (4) blistering resentment for the outwardly happy and seemingly well-adjusted.

I have never—and I mean ever—had a real desire to let otherwise-unaccounted-for money just chill in my bank account unmolested for more than maybe a week and a half. I barely have the willpower to leave other people’s money alone for the short time it’s in my custody. Money that isn’t earmarked for some pressing (transportation/pharmaceutical/credit card balance) need?! Why, yes, I do need fourteen nearly identical blushes, thank you.

then sit back and watch your judgmental friend splutter and try to choke out a response, because what people like that really want is to show off how much more cultured and evolved they are than you, and saying “I like it!” (include the exclamation point, I mean it!) robs them of that opportunity

I know a lot of hot, unconventionally beautiful ladies who kick ass and have sex with rock-star dudes and aren't sorry about it at all. I need to say this loud for the girls in the back of the class: if a dude doesn't want to have to use both hands to grab your ass, that's totally cool; its his choice. But that doesn't make you a piece of shit. You hoist up your saddlebags and go find some dude who thinks you're rad and doesn't mind wiping the sweat off your bottom stomach when you switch sex positions. Don't be all down in the dumps (like a truck truck truck) and let opportunists and perverts take advantage of some low self-esteem you're absolutely too awesome to have.

I do so much shit I don't want anyone to see or know about. That I never want to have to explain to another human being. And I want to keep doing that.

Anyway, this dude came up to me and introduced himself, then clocked my drink and went to get me a fresh one, which is a very seductive thing to do for a poor person.

I'm so embarrassed by everything all the time, humiliated even by the need to breathe air where other people can see me

Let me save you from the heartbreak caused by the withering look on your nephew's face when you attempt to make small talk about anything invented in the last ten years: don't.

Damn, she uses a lot of exclamation points. The eagerness to please was palpable. What a huge mistake.

I hate being attended to, even when I’m paying and tipping 25 percent for it, because not only do I not deserve it, but I will also never maintain it.

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever pooped on a reliable schedule>

He's not a bus - stop waiting for him. Catch the next one!

how to deal with unrepentantly loud neighbors you’re not in charge of, which seems to be a running theme of adulthood.

Can’t we just make holding hands while partially clothed a real motherfucking thing? Is mutual masturbation really so terrible? Because actual human sex is sometimes the goddamned worst.

We gotta normalize the idea that people who live together and work near each other and know all the same people are eventually gonna run out of shit to say to each other and acknowledge that that’s natural and healthy.

Settling” is a coarse way of saying “adjusting my expectations,” and I think that gets a bad rap. Dude, I would rather settle than be “chronically unfulfilled due to my outsize desires.” I don’t mean that you should marry someone you hate just because they won’t go away, but I do think it’s worth examining what you actually want while being honest about what is important to you. Then it won’t feel like such a compromise, you know? On top of that, it’s totally unfair to make a flesh-and-bone person compete against an imaginary ideal that was imprinted on you when you were too young to understand what was happening. Shit, growing up I wanted to marry the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. A strong, virile creature who read tons of books and could fuck up a wolf ? Yes please! Sign me up! I could’ve lain awake every night waiting for Mufasa to save me from a wildebeest stampede in a gorge, but do I climb into bed next to a fucking lion? No, bitch, because I am realistic. Instead, I married this person who makes her own kombucha and charges her crystals under the new moon. Girl, adapt!

I fucking love LA (dog birthday parties! spiritual healers on every corner! unironic oxygen bars!). You might not think so because I’m a misanthropic depressed person with menopause acne whose hips are too wide for every single restaurant chair in Silverlake, but you would be wrong. I’m a Fat Bitch from the Middle West and I love accidentally running into minor celebrities with my cart in the wheatgrass aisle at the Rock ’N Roll Ralph’s on Sunset.

My lady and I were out getting hammered at the local watering hole on a weeknight and feeling like cool olds, when the waiter asked if it was “moms’ night out,” while offering to explain to us what whiskey is. And now I’m a corpse—please bury me in my L.L.Bean comfort fleece. ME: “Excuse me, I have tattoos, Jeff.” “Oh my goodness, ma’am, I’m so sorry, I just saw the fluid collecting at your ankles and assumed—” HIM: What the fuck is happening to my life? What vibe am I giving off ? Yes, I am wearing soft, pull-on, straight-leg Gloria Vanderbilts, but I also have cool glasses and a motherfucking hand tattoo. Couldn’t it just be middle school art teachers’ happy hour, Jeff ?!

You can use "I like it!" (the exclamation point is necessary) any time some freak questions a regular-ass thing you enjoy, and it'll swipe their legs out from under them every single time, and you can stand over their quivering body with your subpar tastes and laugh your face off.

Have you ever considered what a friendship is, or what any of your current friendships are, and thought about how to present that to a prospective new friend...How do you convince a stranger to give you their real e-mail when you are definitely going to litter their gmail dot come with dumb nonsense.

Bodies are an off-limit subject for me in general because if I have to talk to you about your body, then you're gonna very courteously ask me about my body, and then I have to watch you struggle to be polite as I launch into a laundry list of my physiological issues while you try not to say "Have you considered dying?" to my face.

I live every single day in fear that a stranger might yell at me for some normal community thing I am doing wrong, like pulling up to the gas pump at a weird angle or exiting out of the wrong door. So, I cannot imagine being brave enough to take my time giving explicit instructions about my latte while people who are close enough to touch me get mad at me.

I just don’t want to do that anymore. Can’t we just lie fully clothed in bed together while holding hands and talking about how good pork belly tacos taste? I don’t want to do the “I’m sorry this is my disgusting body” apology jig ever again, nor will there ever be a time that the “just let me keep my shirt on” waltz isn’t utterly humiliating. Why must they always argue? Just let me keep this stupid long-sleeved shirt on already.