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“Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there. ”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can’t afford to be with them. It’s not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog, no one tells you what the price is. You set it yourself, and if you’re lucky it’s reasonable. You have a sense of when you’re about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, Enough of this shit. Stop making excuses. No one’s that busy at work. No one’s allergic to whipped cream. There are too cell phones in Sweden. But most people don’t get lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you’ll figure out if it’s worth it later.”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays

“I do want to get married. It's a nice idea. Though I think husbands are like tattoos--you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life instead of just wandering into a tattoo parlor on some idle Sunday and saying, 'I feel like I should have one of these suckers by now. I'll take a thorny rose and a "MOM" anchor, please. No, not that one--the big one.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Uniqueness is wasted on youth. Like fine wine or a solid flossing habit, you'll be grateful for it when you're older.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“I called my mother immediately to inform her that she was a bad parent. "I can't believe you let us watch this. We ate dinner in front of this."

"Everyone watched Twin Peaks," was her response.

"So, if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it, too?"

"Don't be silly," she laughed, "of course I would, honey. There'd be no one left on the planet. It would be a very lonely place.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“It is my belief that people who speak of high school with a sugary fondness are bluffing away early-onset Alzheimer's. ”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Sometimes we don't know what we want until we don't get it.”
― Sloane Crosley

“I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information....my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen, and under the classic caveat of 'loving each other very, very much,' explained that when a man and a woman hug tightly, the man plants a seed in the woman. The seed grows into a baby. Then she sent me to the pantry to get placemats. As a direct result of this conversation, I wouldn't hug my father for two months.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“It's not that you have lost touch with these people. You haven't. It's just that they have kept in such close touch with each other. When scrolling through your cell phone, you generally let their numbers be highlighted for a second, hovering, and then move along to people you have spoken to within the last month. It's not that you're a bad friend to these people. It's just that you're not a great one. They know the names of each other's coworkers and the blow-by-blow nature of each other's dramas; they go camping in the Berkshires together and have such sentences in their conversational arsenal as "you left your lip gloss in my bathroom." You have no such sentences. Your connection to your friends is half-baked and you are starting to forget their siblings' names, never mind their coworkers. But you're still in the play even if you're no longer a main character.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Because, ten-year-olds of the world, you shouldn't believe what your teachers tell you about the beauty and specialness and uniqueness of you. Or, believe it, little snowflake, but know it won't make a bit of difference until after puberty. It's Newton's lost law: anything that makes you unique later will get your chocolate milk stolen and your eye blackened as a kid. Won't it, Sebastian? Oh, yes, it will, my little Mandarin Chinese-learning, Poe-reciting, high-top-wearing friend. God bless you, wherever you are.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change when you're not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unstable cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because . . . Ooooh. Shiny. ”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays

“Time grabs you by the scruff of your neck and drags you forward. You get over it, of course. Everyone was right about that. One mathematically insignificant day, you stop hoping for happiness and become actually happy.”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays

“I still think of Oregon Trail as a great leveler. If, for example, you were a twelve-year-old girl from Westchester with frizzy hair, a bite plate, and no control over your own life, suddenly you could drown whomever you pleased. Say you have shot four bison, eleven rabbits, and Bambi's mom. Say your wagon weighs 9,783 pounds and this arduous journey has been most arduous. The banker's sick. The carpenter's sick. The butcher, the baker, the algebra-maker. Your fellow pioneers are hanging on by a spool of flax. Your whole life is in flux and all you have is this moment. Are you sure you want to forge the river? Yes. Yes, you are.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Friendship is a Spackle in itself. You'll forgive your friends a lot, and if you're a woman, you'll forgive your straight male friends even more. They represent the possibility of mutual toleration between the sexes, a keyhole into the mind of the Other, and the promise of one day meeting someone just like them except that you want to sleep with them.”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays

“I thought of a high school report I did on the Belgian artist Rene Magritte and a quote I once read from him, something about his favorite walk being the one he took around his own bedroom. He said that he never understood the need for people to travel because all the poetry and perspective you're ever going to get you already posses. Anais Nin had the same idea. We see the world as we are. So if it's the same brain we bring with us every time we open our eyes, what's the difference if we're looking at an island cove or a pocket watch?”
― Sloane Crosley

“Ladies. Large masses of girls are often prone to this salutation. I hate being mollified with this unsolicited "ladies" business. I know we're all women. I am conscious of my breasts. Do I have to be conscious of yours as well? Do men do this? Do they go, "Men: Meet for ribs in the shed after the game. Keg beer, raw eggs, and death metal only." I would imagine not.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can't afford to be with them.”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays

“The children were overwhelmingly morbid. Not a single adult asked me where butterflies go when they die, but this question was more popular than pixie sticks with the under-four-foot set. I cursed parents for not preparing their children. When I was five, my mother and sister sat me up on the kitchen counter and explained the facts of life: the Easter Bunny didn't exist, Elijah was God's invisible friend, with any luck Nana would die soon, and if I ever saw a unicorn, I should kill it or catch it for cash. I turned out okay.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“I prefer to record all traumas and save them for later, playing them over and over so they can haunt me for a disproportionate number of weeks to come. It's very healthy.”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays

“In my lame pescetarian defense, it's very hard to be a girl and say you won't eat something. Refuse one plate of bacon-wrapped pork rinds and you're anorexic. Accept them and you're on the Atkins. Excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and you're bulimic. Best to keep perfectly still and bring an IV of fluids with you to dinner.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“It seemed more and more like something out of a children's book - the butterfly that followed the little girl all the way home to her fifth-floor walk-up. How above-the-law children's books are. Hansel and Gretel (littering, breaking and entering), Rumpelstiltskin (forced labor), Snow White (conspiracy to commit murder), Rapunzel (breach of contract).”
― Sloane Crosley

“No affair that begins with such an orchestrated overture can end on a simple note.”
― Sloane Crosley

“Hey there.' I cleared my throat. 'How are you?'
I'm engaged!'
Incidentally, this is an unacceptable answer to that question.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Because this is the beauty of strangers: we're all just doing our best to help each other out, motivated not by karma but by a natural instinct to help the greater whole.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“This was before I knew that the timing of a cruel thing does not make it more or less cruel, before I knew that only good way to hurt someone is never.”
― Sloane Crosley, Cult Classic

“I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off one’s cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family.”
― Sloane Crosley

“When I was 14, a camp counselor explained what "eating out" was and I vowed to never have it done to me. It seemed cannibalistic and unhygienic. I also remember that she claimed--in front of an entire cabin of girls--to have been "eaten out" by one of the maintenance men in a hot tub. Under hot water. Either something is amiss in my memory of this conversation or she found the most talented man on the planet and all hope is lost for the rest of us.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“A human being can spend only so much time outside her comfort zone before she realizes she is still tethered to it.”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays