Lena Dunham Quotes

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

~ Lena Dunham

All adventurous women do.

~ Lena Dunham

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 watched men order at dinner, ask for shitty wine and extra bread with confidence I could never muster, and thought, what a treat that must be. But I also considered 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.

~ Lena Dunham

Women saying, 'I'm not a feminist' is my greatest pet peeve. Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs? Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house? Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights? Great, then you're a feminist.

~ Lena Dunham

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. Then why am I so sad?

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

I have the nagging sense that my true friends are waiting for me, beyond college, unusual women whose ambitions are as big as their past transgressions, whose hair is piled high, dramatic like topiaries at Versailles, and who never, ever say too much information when you mention a sex dream you had about your father.

~ Lena Dunham

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...

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

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 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.

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

Her Brooklyn accent only comes out when she's angry. This is the best part....I pick at my pancakes while she tells me, simply, It's ok 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.

~ Lena Dunham

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

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

I have only touched one other computer at my friend Marissa's house, and found the experience disconcerting. There was something sinister about the green letters and numbers that flashed on the screen as the computer booted up, and I hated the way Marissa stopped answering questions or noticing me the second it was turned on.

~ Lena Dunham

For me, sleep equaled death. How was closing your eyes and losing consciousness any different from death? What separated temporary loss of consciousness from permanent obliteration?

~ Lena Dunham

I can feel them. The babies. They're not crawling all over me. They're not vomiting in my hair or shrieking. They're doing perfectly normal baby things, and I'm keeping them alive. But I resent them. Their constancy, their intrusion on my relationship and my free time and my naps and my imagination and my heart. They've come too soon, and I can't do any of what I had planned. All I can do is survive.

~ Lena Dunham

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

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

How are we supposed to live every day if we know we're going to die?' He looked at me, clearly pained by the dawning of my genetically predestined morbidity. He had been the same way as a kid. A day never went by where he didn't think about this eventual demise. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, unable to conjure a comforting answer. 'You just do'.

~ Lena Dunham

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?

~ Lena Dunham

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

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

I go back to Oberlin in the dead of winter to give a convocation speech in Finney Chapel, the largest and most historic of campus structures. In a subconscious nod to my college experience I forget to pack both tights and underwear and have to spend the weekend going commando in a wool skirt and knee socks. I am toured around the school like a stranger by a girl who didn't even go here. We stop at a glossy new cafe for tea and scones. She asks if I want a tour of the dormitories- no, I just want to wander around alone and maybe cry.

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

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.

~ Lena Dunham

A month into the semester, I would start showing up twenty minutes late to class again. The rewards weren't enough to keep me on task, and life got in the way. My mind wandered to the future, postcollege, when I'd create my own schedule that served my need to eat a rich snack every five to fifteen minutes. As for the disappointment written across the teacher's face? I couldn't, and wouldn't, care.

~ Lena Dunham

Remember when you discovered your father owned a book called How To Disappear and Never Be Found? You're sure it was just research for new and creative ways of thinking, for concepts that might apply to his work, but it raised the distinct possibility that there is something very upsetting that people you love could do instead of dying.

~ Lena Dunham

I've never seen Star Wars or The Godfather, so that would be a good excuse for us to spend a bunch of time together.

~ Lena Dunham

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

~ Lena Dunham

When I graduated college I had a series of just humiliating jobs that I couldn't believe I was at.

~ Lena Dunham

Positive, healthy, loving relationships in your twenties... I don't know if anyone would disagree with it: I think they're the exception, not the norm. People are either playing house really aggressively because they're scared of what an uncertain time it is, or they're avoiding commitment altogether.

~ Lena Dunham

I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age.

~ Lena Dunham

I mean, I - it's so funny, I am, you know, I am, you know, a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I've been sort of taking this very long, stuttering period of moving out.

~ Lena Dunham

I never thought of myself as like, a funny person.

~ Lena Dunham

My mom knows pretty well how I see her.

~ Lena Dunham

I'm not great at dating, but I need to do it to relax.

~ Lena Dunham

All my freakouts have been pretty private and directed at family pets and/or people I have been dating for too short a time to freak out at in that way.

~ Lena Dunham