Stephanie Danler Quotes

The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn't look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn't call to mind. She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.

~ Stephanie Danler

It was the day after Thanksgiving. I was the 3 p.m. backwaiter, but the trains were running irregularly, and while I had heard one sighing into the station as I ran down the stairs, my card was out of money. Which is to say, I was late.

~ 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.

~ Stephanie Danler

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.

~ Stephanie Danler

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.

~ Stephanie Danler

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.

~ Stephanie Danler

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.

~ Stephanie Danler

How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should super-cede them.

~ Stephanie Danler

When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the wall toward them.

~ Stephanie Danler

The city was radiant and I felt untouchable.

~ Stephanie Danler

I said, It really didn't feel like a choice. Where else is there to go?

~ Stephanie Danler