Jeffrey Ellinger

What does all this prove? Only that we want things we think we want but do not, and the things we had but gave away, those are the things we want more than anything.

I would take a picture of you and send it back to you, because even though I know everyone would like to see you, you alone deserve to gaze upon your dumplings.

I’m sorry. It’s clear now. We never had a shot.

Call me a literary schadenfreudist, but I like books about writers who fail at life.

Until we untie ourselves from the idea that one group of people is bad and the other is good, nothing will change. There will be a million more wasteful blog posts. A billion meaningless hashtags.

I could submit to this place or write for that place, or go on a run, or look at someone’s Twitter and dream I have their life of writing lists for Buzzfeed by day and selling adorable but profane embroidery by night

And though Jesus had made the two women, composed their breasts from nothing, even caused the sun to rise and give them that slightest twinge of brown, he couldn’t help but regret making their forms so healthy.

I’m just trying to save you from years of embarrassing Crossfit.

She invited me to the lit party as well. It would celebrate writers, and people who knew writers, and bloggers who once dated people who called themselves writers.

I do not tell my father what I do in the evening, my painting. I dream to be something elusive, and I fear that maddens him. Yet I continue. Because I cannot stop.

And I think it was the way he said Manhattan, so cheerfully, that made my heart break, reminding me that I would go on a date with someone so pathetically desperate for love.

Youth blinded her. Circumstances get in the way. That’s just how life is.

Do the Wal-Mart chant before a shift of work at Wal-Mart

I don’t mean to denigrate or embellish. These are just facts, the ways to know if you’ve met someone who has 200 Twitter followers. They are lonely, narcissistic, sad, unemployed, foul-smelling, incompetent, and contagious like herpes.

Do I deserve a wife? Or a house perhaps, and a good-sized dog who hardly ever barks.

All kale has become pizza.

Birds – “Not all birds,” God said, “but most birds, their job is to get up every morning and yell, I’m a bird! Can you hear me? I’m a bird right now!”

Now it’s over. She pats your chest and walks to her car. Growing smaller, she is drifting like an ocean tide, and you find yourself suffocating with fondness. Your only oxygen is knowing you will see her again. Your sweatshirt too.