86 Quotes by Stephanie Danler

I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.

You," she said. She grabbed my wrist and pressed two fingers onto me as if taking my pulse and I stopped breathing. "I know you. I remember you from my youth. You contain multitudes. There is a crush of experience coursing by you. And you want to take every experience on the pulse.

Pigeons flew in diminishing waves between the low buildings. The sun rose. It said, Now that you've done this, you can never have that. Now that I'm like this, I can never go back.

She re-marked her lips with her lipstick. I saw sprays of silver in her coarse hair. I saw inscriptions of her years around her mouth, a solid crease between her brows from a lifetime of cynicism. The posture of a woman who had stood in a casual spotlight in every room she'd ever been in, not for gloss or perfection, for self-possession. Everything she touched she added an apostrophe to.

You know, you the worst kind, you want to marry the artist and live like squalor, but you wait, in five years you be like, Baby Jake why we eat ramen noodles every night? You a hustler, don't blind me, I see.

All right, Tess. You want it all? You don't care about consequences? Then it is too late. I could tell you to leave him alone. That he's complicated, not in a sexy way, but in a damaged way. I could tell you damage isn't sexy, it's scary. You're still young enough to think every experience will improve you in some long-term way, but it isn't true. How do you suppose damage gets passed on?

I'm sick of that, I said. Young, young, young, that's what I get, all day, everyday. But I know your secret....You're all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you've taken as you've grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined. I don't have to compromise yet. I don't have to do a single thing I don't want to do. That's why you hate me.

Does anyone come to New York clean? I'm afraid not. But crossing the Hudson I thought of crossing Lethe, milky river of forgetting.

So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.