Lena Dunham Quotes

Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.

You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.

You've learned a new rule and it's simple: don't put yourself in situations you'd like to run away from.

It's not brave to do something that doesn't scare you.

When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.

The end never comes when you think it will. It's always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.

There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.

Respect isn’t something you command through intimidation and intellectual bullying. It’s something you build through a long life of treating people how you want to be treated

I just don't want to be around people who don't hate everything in their life right now.

Throughout the day I often ask myself, Could I fall asleep right now? and the answer is always a resounding yes.

But I also think when we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other.

Guys warning girls not to fall in love with them is so truly douchey that it should have a higher success rate.

I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.

I think if you feel like you were born to write, then you probably were.

I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.

When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself.

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

Enjoy going through life as yourself.

I didn't know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. At the moments it should logically strike, I am fit as a fiddle. On a lazy afternoon, I am seized by a cold dread.

You've learned a new rule and it's simple: don't put yourself in situations you'd like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself, like that bunny in Runaway Bunny runs to its mother, but you are the mother, and you'll see that laer and be very, very proud.

I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I'm jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they're trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence.

It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.

Okay, 'Best Party Ever' -- to me, that's like saying 'Best Gym Ever' or 'Best Nature Documentary Ever,' like how good can it really be?

That is because no one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone's gonna think of to say about me, I've already said to me, about me, probably within the last half hour.

Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe.

I deserved kisses. I deserved to be treated like a piece of meat but also respected for my intellect.

Once, my little sister was walking down the street in her thick black glasses, and a homeless man muttered, “Talk nerdy to me.

I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am.

I’ve always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for.

Here's what I have to say about being married: someday you will look at him, hating him with every fiber of your being, wishing that he would die the most violent death possible. It will pass." --Hannah Horvath's dying grandmother

Barbie’s disfigured. It’s fine to play with her just as long as you keep that in mind.

The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.

You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.” I will use this line many times in the years to come, giving it as a gift to anyone who needs it.

I didn't drink in the essence of the classroom. I didn't take legible notes or dance all night. I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we'd make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened.

I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by. Women I wish to see again, to see them smile and laugh and say, It was all as it should have been.

I always reminded myself that this wasn't exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren't they?

Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late.

There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.

Girls are trained to say, ‘I wrote this, but it’s probably really stupid.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t write a novel if you thought it was really stupid. Men are much more comfortable going, ‘I wrote this book because I have a unique perspective that the world needs to hear.’ Girls are taught from the age of seven that if you get a compliment, you don’t go, ‘Thank you’, you go, ‘No, you’re insane.

The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.

When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it, you start to mean less to yourself.

When she writes, which isn't often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known.

that’s also how I felt in high school, sure that my people were from elsewhere and going elsewhere and that they would recognize me when they saw me.

Luxury is nice, but creativity is nicer.

I can’t find a goddamn fucking job and I’m too fat to be a stripper,” I said as I polished off a stale croissant.

Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve.

Ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put

Later in the summer your grandfather dies, and you’re secretly glad. You have a place to put all your sorrow now, one that people will understand.

She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions.

I find the term “girl crush” slightly homophobic, as if I need to make it clear that my crush on another woman is not at all sexual but, rather, mild and adorable, much like … a girl.

As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter.

Family first. Work second. Revenge third.

Let this book take you to the stars and beyond.

D. J. Tanner called and she wants her wardrobe back so it can be included in a museum retrospective about the prime years of Full House.

She asks me my worst quality, and I say I can be very self-involved. She says hers is that she gets lost in the world of her work and can't find her way back out again.

If someone doesn’t answer your email within six hours, it means they hate you.

I think about death, when I lie in bed and imagine disintegrating, my skin going leathery and my hair petrifying and a tree growing out of my stomach, it’s a way to avoid what’s right in front of me. It’s a way to not be here, in the uncertainty of right now.

The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form... I didn't know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do.

It’s become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I’ll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology.

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day.… —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary

I feel like there are fifty ways it's my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way.

Rich, you don't need to fight it. I'm not like, trying to frame you. I am letting you know that it is OK for you to act on this fantasy, because I am gross and so are you.

Drunk emotions aren't real emotions.

The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action.

I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn’t heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.)

Respect isn’t something you command through intimidation and intellectual bullying. It’s something you build through a long life of treating people how you want to be treated and focusing on your mission.

The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that I knew deserved more. Different. Better. But that isn't how it works.

My friend Jenni calls them Sunshine Stealers. Men who have been at it a little too long, who are tired of the ride but can't get off. They're looking for some new form of energy, of approval. It's linked with sex, but it's not the same. What they want to take from you is way worse than your thong in the back of their Lexus. It's ideas, curiosity, an excitement about getting up in the morning and making things.

But I want to tell my stories, more than that, I have to in order to stay sane.

That being said, it's horrible when people you hate get things you want.

After all, desire is the enemy of contentment.

You can’t draw blood from a stone,

And I decided then that I will never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won't be threatened by the old, or by the new. I'll open wide like a daisy every morning. I will make my work.

It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.

But surveying those words I realized they are mine. He is mine to protect. There is so much I've shared, and so much that's been crushed by the sharing. I never mourned it, because it never mattered.

If we follow the Buddhist logic that we are becoming part of glory of the universe, one huge consciousness, well, that's just too much togetherness for my taste. I couldn't even do a group art project in second grade. How am I going to share understanding with the rest of the creation? If this proves to be the case, I'm too much of a loner for death, but I'm also scared of being lonely. Where does that leave me?

And then there I was, literally tenderized like pounded meat by my year of work, failure, and physical and emotional battering. My New Zealand beach realization that I was ready for all of the things I had feared I was too broken to ever want felt both good because it meant that I was normal, but also terrifying. I was normal. Years later, Lena Dunham’s character on Girls would have a similar moment when she broke down and wept to a nice, handsome doctor with a beautiful house, “Please don’t tell anyone this, but I want to be happy … I want all the things everyone wants.” I was embarrassed to be a thirty-five-year-old woman who was looking for true love, and a family. It was so freaking typical. But I was also deeply relieved that I’d finally gotten there.

Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.

But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.

I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.

Before entering Joaquin's house I always reminded myself that this wasn't exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren't they?

After several interactions in which he questioned my authority and pretended not to hear me speaking, it was clear he was my type

What a goon. He's lucky to know you, but too stupid to ever realize it.

You’ve learned a new rule and it’s simple: don’t put yourself in situations that you’d like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself, like that bunny in Runaway Bunny runs to its mother, but you are the mother, and you’ll see that later and be very, very proud

It’s a little too cold to be outside and we wear our sunglasses, shrinking down into our hoodies. I pick at my pancakes while she tells me, simply, “It’s okay to change your mind.” About a feeling, a person, a promise of love. I can’t stay just to avoid contradicting myself. I don’t have to watch him cry.

This is a reference to when I told him that, as a child, I was hypnotized by my own beauty. This was the time in life before I learned it wasn’t considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself.

The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. But that isn't how it works. When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself.

No, I was crying because I was suddenly flooded with an understanding of how little I really knew: about her pains, her secrets, the fantasies that played in her head when she lay in bed at night. Her inner life.

I've never wanted to be with women so much as I wanted to be them: there are women whose career arc excites me, whose ease of expression is impressive, whose mastery of party banter has bee simultaneously hostile and rapt.

But that isn’t how it works. When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.

You are mad to be spending the summer in the country, where the days are too quiet and you have so much time to think. In the city you live on Broadway, where the noise is so thick your scary thoughts can't get a word in edgewise. But here in the county, there is only space. On the stone bridge by the stream. On the mossy rock at the edge of the yard. Behind the abandoned trailer where Art, the old man with the glass eye, used to live. Space, space, space, and you can scare yourself into thinking your thoughts are more like voices.

But that's how I felt in high school, sure that my people were from elsewhere, and going elsewhere, and that they would recognise me when they saw me. They would like me enough that it wouldn't matter if I liked myself. They would see the good in me so that I could, too.

I understand that you come from a generation of women who had to work hard to be heard, but for you to impugn my feminism and act as though I'm a scourge upon women everywhere, just because I refuse to spread your particular agenda? That's dark, and it's not what you fought for. If you continue this way, you're worse than they are (they = men). We are all just trying to get by. There is room for all of us.

Is what’s manifesting as a fear actually some instinct to resist being young? Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late. Is the sense of imminent death bound up in the desire to leave some kind of a legacy?

I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I’m jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they’re trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence... But I also consider being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can’t articulate them. It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.

I've always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me "You're still awake! Hiiii." And I'd think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that.

I feel like there are fifty ways it's my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little bit easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to be handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us. I never gave him permission. In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking.

Here’s who it’s not okay to share a bed with: Anyone who makes you feel like you’re invading their space. Anyone who tells you that they “just can’t be alone right now.” Anyone who doesn’t make you feel like sharing a bed is the coziest and most sensual activity they could possibly be undertaking (unless, of course, it is one of the aforementioned relatives; in that case, they should act lovingly but also reserved/slightly annoyed). Now, look over at the person beside you. Do they meet these criteria? If not, remove them or remove yourself. You’re better off alone.

If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognized their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside my resentment, dropped my defenses. I might have a basic understanding of European history or economics. More abstractly, I might feel I had truly been somewhere, open and porous and hungry to learn. Because being a student was an enviable identity and one I can only reclaim by attending community college late in life for a bookmaking class or something.

The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form. I felt like I was outside my own body, watching myself work. I didn’t care if I succeeded or failed because I wasn’t totally sure I was alive. Between scenes I hid in the bathroom and prayed for the ability to cry, a sure sign I was real. I didn’t know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. At the moments it should logically strike, I am fit as a fiddle. On a lazy afternoon, I am seized by a cold dread. In this moment I had plenty to be anxious about: pressure, exposure, a tense argument with a beloved colleague. But I had even more to be thankful for. Yet I couldn’t feel anything.