Jenny Slate Quotes

As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.

I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.

I am tired of sinking down to a lower place to be with men. I am tired of throwing a tarp over some of my personality so that the shape of my identity suits some gross man a little better for whatever shitty things he needs to do in order to keep his boring identity erect and supreme.

I am that mysterious stranger that I hoped to meet. I met her at a dark dance. We came here to live together until I could stay by myself. The place is here. The time is now. This is all my lifetime.

Each time I fall in love I feel fear that the world won't let me be in the world with it, that I either have to pick the world or the love.

The more you give, the more you have, the more new things you are a part of, the more you are truly alive.

I think I've come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am.

I take it as a sign that it is all right to be alive as I am, just as I am, and to keep trying.

I can’t become smaller to fit into a crouching love in somebody else’s meager world. I don’t do that anymore. I have calmed down. I have consolidated. I have come through the reckoning that I required.

Who will meet me at once in all of my worlds and pump with all of my hearts? To have to kill even one of my hearts to match up with you is simply not worth it to me, after all that has happened.

I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can’t add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps

So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one

I'd rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.

Well, I am so sensitive and I am very fragile but so is everything else, and living with a dangerous amount of sensitivity is sort of what I have to do sometimes, and it is so very much better than living with no gusto at all. And I’d rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.

I’m tired of looking for a place in another.

Information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on.

But what am I supposed to do with all of the parts of my heart that are only there to be given?

Sometimes I enact destruction just to reenact my faith that things can be built up again. But I'm trying to stop the first part of that and just have the faith.

I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.

A psychic recently looked right into the eternal cosmos and then returned to me with this elegant yet cryptic message: Grow up.

When people get a glimpse of me I’d like them to feel like it is a good omen.

It is a certain type of person who feels this way that I feel, and I'm proud to be one, and now I see that I must really not forget that the style of what I find beautiful is incredible to me, that it is incredible to feel lucky to want to want what one wants, to be able to see the rings of yourself this way.

Yes, there have been lots of feelings that have felt like breaths in with no out breaths.

What if I got a crown for doing nothing but being who I am,

If I could remember anything, I would remember my belief that my extra love could just be used on myself.

It occurs to me as I fight so hard with myself that these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself.

Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice). Give in. Fall apart. Look at the pieces. Reassemble. This is the essential movement of my holy flux.

even when I am happy, it sometimes happens that the slightest things can tip me into nonspecific sadness when I am alone.

Please come close enough so that I can see you, and then I will try to do the rest for both of us, because I have not learned my lesson yet and do not possess the faith to believe in the partner who does his side of the thing. But I would love it if you would, because that would be dreamy and then I would also have that faith. I will give you every single treat.

Sometimes do you ever get jealous of the plants, that they only have to grow and not know about it, and they don’t take anything personally?

I have wondered on many occasions if any confidence I have is just a weird side effect of foolishness and I live under the weight of so much embarrassment, I’m surprised the top of my head isn’t flat.

To have to kill even one of my hearts to match up with you is simply not worth it to me, after all that has happened.

Who will let me be the real animal of myself?

It occurs to me that if anyone ever bullies me again I will warn them one time but probably start to stop loving them, and that if they do it again I will have my final answer, that a person who does that to me does not love me. And then I will explain that their behavior has made it clear to me that I want to leave, and although I will have been clear, I will have been respectful, I will leave without participating in condemnation. I will go without digging deeper into the dark.

The women were new friends but I loved them in a massive way. The love was like a large trove of devotion that could only be amassed over time, but it had arrived all at once. The way I loved them felt like it was from long ago.

I want to look out a window at something bright and wide, and at that point accept my nature and understand my intended use and have a clean shirt and clean hands and feel similar to a small planet.

I was born on the boundary line between cold and hot, at the intersection of the two elements that make a clap of thunder.

My vulnerability is natural and permissible and beautiful to me, and it should remind you of your responsibility to behave like a friend to me and the world.

There has been a misunderstanding about wildness. Bring it in, bring it in, bring wildness in and care for it.

I was born bucking the idea that I should have to be anywhere that I don’t like or talk to people who make me feel dead or trapped.

All I want to do is disappear deeply into my own thing and you can decide whether or not to join but I’m pretty much going to enter my own vortex.

My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.

I love myself. I think that I am a very top-quality person.

This is what makes my mother my mother. She loves the flower and she wants me to know this flower, but she will only smell it once, and then give it to me for unlimited sniffing pleasure and she will be happy about it all.

For a while I would have trench-times, when everything felt like blank paper, and I couldn't feel anyone's heart pointed even in my direction, let alone anyone loving me or wanting me to be around. Very boring, very lonely, very tired, again. It was hard to feel anything except "I am not one of the creatures who will experience anything precious.

But back to the sea captain and his broken heart. I somehow always felt that this was my story as well. Maybe because I was so obsessed with what it would feel like to one day fall in love, to have another person who loved you the most, and loved you so much, voluntarily, that it became involuntary.

Look at me and say, "Oh, I really shouldn't," just because you want to have me so very much.

It occurs to me, even as I’m not sure what’s left of me, that I can use what is still alive to really behave in a way that I admire.

If you let me onto your land, I might be very wild, and I will not be able to totally change myself, but you can always track me by the tinkle of my lively clamor.

But what is so hard is that even when I die my light still stays on.

Your feelings of joy are not fake if you are having them! You are allowed to feel joy about sitting on the lap of a dog in a dream, and taking a ride in a van with open windows and sharing a seatbelt. God dammit, this is a gift from your fucking soul! Self-generate, don’t you see? Break the trap break the trap break the trap leave the trench!

That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.

There are no odds to beat anymore, just some real junk to dump. You dump your junk. After you dump it, you don’t sort it in your mind. You dump your junk and you walk away. You wear all one color on the outside, swirl with every color on the inside. You walk forward. You keep your head angled up so that you see over the fray. You protect yourself and all the little weirds that make up who you are.

You won’t let the idiots and the assholes get past the front gate of your heart. They can yell from the sidewalk. They can yell terrible things, because they are shut

I said goodbye to all of them and I felt very odd. Something had happened but nothing had happened, really. Nobody touched me but it felt like I had been touched.

Look at you! You have done what the earliest geniuses have done: You have taken the most basic thing and elevated it. If you are sweet inside of yourself for the most part, this is the truth you will know.

They were part of a forest, an ecosystem that is perfect because of its wide variety of species, dominant because nothing is not allowed to be there. In the forest, everything that is inclined to thrive really does, and has a job, and some jobs are to grow things up and some jobs are to take things apart and everything is accepted because there is no notion—among bacteria and moss and busy mice—there is no notion of who deserves to do something or be in a place. There are only lives to be lived, and they are everywhere.

I cover my body with a fabric that has been made into a certain shape to help remind you of my butt and vagina, but it does not show the actual butt or vagina that I have.

you do know that telling people things is not the same as living by the principle of the things, right?

I am connected to eternity and I am part of everything and although I am with all of it, I am still different from anything and everything. I am an example of a specific way of spending time and feeling existence in this world.

Your heart is factually a part of the universe, which is a miracle of endless force and boundless beauty. There is literally no way that you are not part of that. Despair can force you to turn your eyes away from this fact, but it is the real truth and it will be waiting to be with you when you are free enough to turn back to it.

I believe that wildness belongs in people.

And sometimes I enact destruction just to reenact my faith that things can be built up again. But I’m trying to stop the first part of that and just have the faith.

But when I stop feeling pleasure and stop imagining things I also forget my beliefs, the things that float my spirit on this sea.

Why would a woman have a bra if she was making a snack in her natural habitat, which is of course a house by the sea?

You are dear to yourself in the morning and it is the morning now. It is very private to have such a love for yourself. Closer, closer to the curtain. How funny, your face is right right against the curtain now. How funny to know what side of it you are on! You are asleep! How wonderful to pay attention.

What can I do? I can only breathe in deeply. I can only bellow in a church that is deep inside of myself. I can only blast a shell-shaped horn that would shake down the oldest buildings. I can only leap for joy in my sacred inner caves and ring out the message: I am alive. I woke up again. I might as well be sprouting leaves, I might as well be covered in little clams.

You have my permission to come into this space that is made out of broken-up pieces, of shards and perfect circles, slats and slices. It represents the space that I have found to house my spirit, which is from the universe. I was born to host this party. To be in the party, remind you of the party, live at the event, die at the event.

The super-ego is reiterative. It repeats the most boring, pointy, hurtful things, and if you met it at a party, if it were a person, you would think that the person was not only mean and insane, but also not as smart as they think they are. You wouldn’t listen. You would think they were a shithead.

I know that to be seen is to be taken in

When people get a glimpse of me I'd like them to feel like it is a good omen.

Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

If I deny that the root is in me, I will never change.

A day at the beach was never so dull as it is now. I recycle the same daydreams over and over—

Life has been so discouraging that I have forgotten why and how to fantasize, and I feel weak.

It is so hard because I was born with a love of useful rules but also somehow I am always dropping and breaking them and it makes me feel very bad.

I wanted him to understand that “being vulnerable” is a different thing for everyone, is a developed and specific skill involving personally specific actions that are terrifying.

I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.

I stuff each breast into a cotton cup-bag, and the bags are sewn together as a pair of bags for boobs, and the pair of boob-bags is held on by straps because I guess this helps the boobs from not floating past the mountains and white puffs and into outer space?

Hello, I am a woman here on this ancient ball that rotates with a collection of other balls around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts. Don’t be immature.

The reason I think that it will be hard to meet someone who I am actually interested in is that I cannot stand these preliminary moments when you can’t deeply know each other and be together forever.

In the mornings of my life, I wake up and I blink my eyes open and I stretch my body with a shudder that holds tension like a string pulled so tight that it makes a musical sound when you pluck it with one finger.

Information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on. That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.

Without a person to love, I am too full of what must be let out, and while at least I can use my mind enough to bring out this image of this sea, it feels like life is the beach in the winter. It feels like life is the beach where I used to go with someone who died. It feels almost wrong to be here . .

where your body used to be in the bed, thinking thoughts like, “If I can’t have him then I will bring the sky down into the bed, one kiss at a time, and then it will be like I am in the cosmos with him.” It was a fun activity that helped me fall asleep.

I am the live thing that belongs here, with other live things like this.

You will become a peaceful authority who says no to that voice that wants to undermine and splash you with the gloop of self-doubt in an effort to stall your emergence.

You can create and raise the child, but the spirit...the spirit comes from the universe

everything is art and nature and so are you

Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice).

I am a plant and I have a fragile green stem and my flower is still in the pod on the top of the stalk, unopened, when the dawn strolls in over the horizon. My blossom spreads out during the day and it goes into the pod at night and then it goes again the next day and all of the days.

He has packed his toothbrush. It feels like pleasure to him but also too urgent, it feels like starving as he thinks about how full he would feel, how filling it would be to stand next to me in his pajamas and me in my pajamas and us both using our toothbrushes, looking at ourselves and each other in the mirror. He thinks that it is so precious that he knows that it would be a privilege to be allowed in to my evening. He thinks in layers when he thinks about how he loves me.

I have always known that I would die for love. I think I am dying while or because of waiting for it. I cannot bear how it feels like a surging throng of beats and yells and gasps inside of my small form. I have wondered on many occasions if any confidence I have is just a weird side effect of foolishness and I live under the weight of so much embarrassment, I’m surprised the top of my head isn’t flat.

I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am. But that’s why I want to do comedy, and why I want to connect with people. You can use that ribbon to be a part of a finer tapestry, or you can choke yourself out with it! Your choice! But I’m not gonna get rid of it. But do I want to live as a depressed person who’s afraid of other people and bummed out by the makeup of my personhood? No. So I’ll find a way.

Hello? Tonight I am going to the Restaurant, where I will eat a killed and burned-up bird and drink old purple grapes and also I will gulp clear water that used to have bugs and poop and poison in it but has been cleaned up so that it doesn’t make us blow chunks. Oh Joy I am going to the Restaurant and I am just drooling at the thought of the killed and burned bird and I want to sip the grape gunk and so I put skin-colored paint all over my face and I dab pasty red pigment on my lips and swish peachy powder on my cheeks and I take a pencil and draw an eye-shaped line around my eye so that people know where my blinkers are.

So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for. Nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one.

And even though my head was on backwards and my brain felt, you know, not at its best, I was still aware that two very bad choices were being shoved at me: Tell him that he’s right or at least on the right track and therefore lie and also abandon myself and cause more damage by letting his ignorance and monologue go on forever, or tell him NO, he is not even close to correct, that the fact that he is pontificating and instructing and not actually conversing is a sign that he does not even remotely understand. But then after saying that I would have to weather the storm of his humiliation and frustration, and somehow end up feeling bad about myself, like I should have been gentler and treated him like a child who simply doesn’t know any better.

when you died, the spark of your life flew into me when I watched your breath stop, and the spark did its last energy frizz inside of me and I didn't tell anyone but half of the lights of myself went off as well. Almost every door in me closed too. Most of the space, where you used to tread, to rest, to read, to sleep, most of that space closed up for good. I became a house with only the porch light on.

What am I supposed to do with this memory now? I know that the wise answer is that I should let it be, but there's so much shame in having a bright, hopeful start and a heavy, lead-footed, choked-up end. I want to put this moment forth like a picture that you slide across the table and you say, "This was this. I was here." When your life breaks apart it's hard to know if you are allowed to keep little pieces that are still nice-looking, or if you have to crush them up in order to move on. Do I have to ruin everything that survived the blast in order to accept that the blast occurred? That seems like a bit too much. Do we have to live with shards, carry them around, have new little cuts all the time? Or can these moments be rounded and just left floating in the attic of a nice old beach house, the one I don't live in yet, the one where I will live when I am old, the oldest person on the planet, the softest crone. When I asked my father this question, "What am I supposed to do with this moment now?" he told me to be unashamed while mentioning it, and to consider the idea that some people stay with you in a group, while others drift away. But the reliving of that moment causes me sharp pain, and I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it and my guess is that I'm not, because of the damage I will do or reveal within myself.