Life & Wisdom Quote by Daniel Pinkwater

Pinkwater turns a potentially cruel social script into a comic confession about how status anxiety polices desire. The line starts where so much everyday bias lives: in the imagined jury of "people", an offstage chorus whose opinions are treated as fact. "Gee" is doing quiet work here. It’s not just a filler; it’s the voice of someone caught mid-self-surveillance, trying to sound casual while admitting they’re calculating the reputational cost of being seen with the "wrong" body.

Then Pinkwater swerves. "But they were converted" borrows the language of religion to mock how absurdly moralized attraction can become. Weight isn’t framed as a preference or a circumstance; it’s treated like a stigma that requires redemption. The joke lands because the conversion isn’t really about the women discovering some objective truth about the man’s worth. It’s about revealing how flimsy the social taboo was in the first place: a prejudice that dissolves the moment experience interrupts the stereotype.

"Sometimes surprised" is the kicker, and it’s sharp. Surprise implies the expectation was low. The sentence exposes the insult embedded in "open-mindedness": the idea that dating a fat person is a charitable detour from normal standards, until the fat person inconveniently turns out to be funny, kind, sexy, or interesting.

Pinkwater, a writer steeped in offbeat adolescent perspective and American weirdness, isn’t offering a triumphant lesson. He’s indicting a culture that makes intimacy feel like a public performance review, then congratulates itself when it learns basic humanity.