All Grown Up Quotes

“What if I start making art again? What if I just did that? That is the thing I love, that is the thing I miss the most. For so long I have believed I could never catch up, but now I realize there’s nothing to catch up to, there’s only what I choose to make. There’s still time, I think. I have so much time left.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Her life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions, too much salt and spice, too much anxiety, always a little dribbling down the front of my shirt. But have you tasted it? Have you tasted it. It’s delicious.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Other people you know seem to change quite easily. They have no problem at all with succeeding at their careers and buying apartments and moving to other cities and falling in love and getting married and hyphenating their names and adopting rescue cats and, finally, having children, and then documenting all of this meticulously on the internet. Really, it appears to be effortless on their part. Their lives are constructed like buildings, each precious but totally unsurprising block stacked before your eyes.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“And worst of all, what if you don’t know what you like at all? What if nothing sticks? Then you spend half your life wondering what it is you’re supposed to be doing next. What happens after that?”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I don’t need to jump off cliffs into oceans to die, because every day there is a little death waiting for me. All I have to do is wake up and walk out the front door.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don't want to get married: they don't believe you. They think you're lying to yourself or to them or you're trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse for just telling the truth.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“People architect new lives all the time. I know this because I never see them again once they find these new lives. They have children or they move to new cities or even just to new neighborhoods or you hate their spouse or their spouse hates you or they start working the night shift or they start training for a marathon or they stop going to bars or they start going to therapy or they realize they don’t like you anymore or they die. It happens constantly. It’s just me. I haven’t built anything new. I’m the one getting left behind.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Perfection itself is boring; it's only everything leading up to it that's interesting.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“What do you do when you already know what your problem is? What if it's not really a problem? It's only a problem if I want a relationship. If I want to fit into a conventional mode of happiness. It's only a problem if I care. And I can't tell if I care.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I have a hard enough time being me, not pulling myself apart every single day. And if it wasn’t just my personality and my life choices, but then also my art too? I would die.” I”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I stop painting entirely. I get a job in advertising. I get older. I grow up, I suppose. I never look back except in those moments when I can’t stop fucking thinking about it.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I think about when I used to dress that way, not in that dress, obviously, but in that flesh. I will never do it again. I have learned all kinds of lessons from dressing that way, great lessons, terrible lessons, boring lessons, all of them, the big one being no matter how much you own yourself and your body and your mind, there are men who will always try to seek power over your body, even if it is just with their eyes, although often it is with their words and sometimes with their hands.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I am on Team Drunk Lady, obviously.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“But I cry anyway because it was a path I could have taken and didn't. I cry for the lost idea, the lost concept. Sometimes I cry, too, for who I was as an artist and what my life could have been like if only I had kept going. I weep for my lost identities. I weep for my possibilities.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“One more drink and we’re sharing our rape stories. Nearly every woman I know has one. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard one of these stories I could buy an enormous, plush pillow with which to smother my tear-stained face. Near rape, date rape, rape rape, it’s all the same, I think. Close enough is rape. Once I had a friend tell me this breathless, elaborate story about fighting off a drunk man at a party. He tears her dress, scratches her skin, throttles her throat, and it ends with her punching him in the eye, but, she points out repeatedly, he never actually fucks her. “Thank god nothing happened,” she said to me. I stared at her, and then slowly responded. “Yes,” I said. “Thank god for that.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“We listen to NPR for the first two hours on the road, the strange comfort of bad news reported in reasonable tones,”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“It’s not that you want a baby, or want to get married, or any of it. It’s not your bag. You just feel tired for some reason. Tired of the world. Tired of trying to fit in where you don’t.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“He asks me if I'd like to see the apartment and I say 'Anytime,' and he says, 'Sure, why don't you come up now, then?' I can't think of a reason not to. There's nothing waiting for me at home but my refrigerator, my laptop, and death.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Then she calls me and she’s crying and we talk for a while about her marriage and while I am sad that my friend is sad, it makes me happier than ever that I’ve never been married and never will be, because marriage sounds like a goddamn job, and why would I want another one of those?”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“To be an artist means a lifetime of being told no, with the occasional yes showing up just to give you enough hope to carry on.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I didn’t have it in me,” I say. “The minute I felt unsupported I gave up. I saw that to be a painter meant a lifetime of not being supported.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“mostly I have found myself resisting their sadness when I have so much of my own.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“The thing that made you special is gone.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“It’s not that I don’t care about seeing her baby, it’s that I don’t care about seeing any baby. Also”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I wake up the next morning and dress in all black, secret spy style. My mother eyes me and asks if I’m depressed, and I say, “No, I’m just cool.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“One more drink and we’re sharing our rape stories. Nearly every woman I know has one. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard one of these stories I could buy an enormous, plush pillow with which to smother my tear-stained face.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I go to a children’s store in my neighborhood, pink, chirpy, cheerful, and buy the baby a book, The Giving Tree, a dire story about a selfish child sucking the life out of an enabling tree. (That tree has no agency, is what I’ve always thought.) But that is the book you buy a baby. I’m certain Indigo has five copies of it already. I’m too late to be the first at anything. I also buy a stuffed rabbit, its floppy ears draping softly in a sea of pastel tissue paper inside the gift bag. This, too, I know she has multiple versions of, more or less. There is nothing original I can offer this child. I am obligated to make an offering, however, a virgin to the gods, a stuffed animal to a new baby. If I lay this gift on the altar, will you promise me I’ll never get pregnant? I make sure to get gift receipts for both.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Mas choro na mesma, porque era um caminho possível e eu não fui por aí. Choro pela ideia, pela opção que se perdeu. Às vezes também choro pela artista que havia em mim e pelo que a minha vida poderia ter sido se eu tivesse continuado. Choro por todas as minhas identidades perdidas. Pelas possibilidades que tive.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“WHEN I WAS SMALL—still in my Neil Reardon phase—my father would wash my hair and call me Mrs. Rosenbaum and pretend that his name was Gladys and that we were at a beauty parlor. “We’re just going to touch up your roots, Mrs. Rosenbaum,” he’d say, lathering my head with baby shampoo and speaking in the accent of his own Bronx childhood. “Have you heard about Doris Kaplan? She got a bad perm in Miami. Well you know how Doris is, Mrs. Rosenbaum. With her it’s always something.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“My mother had it all wrong: to bring that into your home, where it lies on a pile of blankets in the TV room, scaring everyone, polluting everything? Misguided. Unthinkable. But I understood, now, her dilemma. I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up