Sloane Crosley Quotes & Sayings

In my lame pescetarian defense, it's very hard to be a girl and say you won't eat something. Refuse one plate of bacon-wrapped pork rinds and you're anorexic. Accept them and you're on the Atkins. Excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and you're bulimic. Best to keep perfectly still and bring an IV of fluids with you to dinner. — Sloane Crosley

I was compiling a list in my head titled 'Reasons to Get Up: You Don't Have to Leave, but You Can't Pee Here. — Sloane Crosley

I thought of a high school report I did on the Belgian artist Rene Magritte and a quote I once read from him, something about his favorite walk being the one he took around his own bedroom. He said that he never understood the need for people to travel because all the poetry and perspective you're ever going to get you already posses. Anais Nin had the same idea. We see the world as we are. So if it's the same brain we bring with us every time we open our eyes, what's the difference if we're looking at an island cove or a pocket watch? — Sloane Crosley

I don't do emoticons unless I'm making a big deal out of them. I'll type out, 'This is so amusing it makes me want to grin in pixels.' And then do it. — Sloane Crosley

But now my problems had been set loose. They could be anywhere at any time and I was just like everyone else I knew: almost positive that there was something profoundly and undiagnosably wrong with me. — Sloane Crosley

I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off one's cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family. — Sloane Crosley

Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time. — Sloane Crosley

Yes. I am writing full-time. Which is strange. It feels like not having a job. — Sloane Crosley

I need new ones of these. Victor pushed his glasses up the Sisyphean slope of his nose. — Sloane Crosley

Who do you have to sleep with to get laid in this town? — Sloane Crosley

It's remarkable the logic we'll build around a misapprehension. — Sloane Crosley

Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there. — Sloane Crosley

Though I think husbands are like tattoos, - you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life instead of just wandering into a tattoo parlor on some idle Sunday and saying, I feel like I should have one of these suckers by now. I'll take a thorny rose and a 'MOM' anchor, please. — Sloane Crosley

Teddy bears are best because they understand it's nice to be alone. — Sloane Crosley

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied. — Sloane Crosley

Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards. — Sloane Crosley

I wouldn't want to live in Berlin. It's bombed out and there's a lot of techno. — Sloane Crosley

I am the proud indentured servant of a brilliant art adviser who may or may not have purposely stapled my index finger to a manila folder — Sloane Crosley

It's not a disability, it's life. We are complicated creatures with larger matters on our plate than tip calculation. I grew up watching TV with my mother while she diagnosed the characters as having hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder. I rolled my eyes and wondered why there weren't any stupid kids anymore. Why did there have to be something to explain everyone? Were the cave people on Ritalin? I didn't think so. — Sloane Crosley

Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway. — Sloane Crosley

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world. — Sloane Crosley

The hardest thing is spending twelve hours a day accommodating the rest of the world, then going home at night and criticizing it. I would be curious about what I'd write if I didn't have to worry about offending. — Sloane Crosley

Weddings are friendship deal breakers if the friendship is weak. There are too many favors, too many tasks, too much required devotion and Aqua Net for imposters like me. I tried to make eye contact with Francine, to give her a knowing good-bye smile like a ghost of a loved one in a movie. It was no usue, I decided to cut my final pink wire. There would be no more yearly "happy birthdays" and certainly no more bonding with the girl in the duct tape dress. That ship had sailed. — Sloane Crosley

There's a lot of pointing. A festival of pointing and at very close range to other people's eyes, given the width of the space. Also detracting from the exhibit's potential tranquility is the display cabinet of pinned specimens along one wall. I found this disturbing from the start. You don't see a whole lot of stuffed polar bears in the polar bear exhibit at the zoo, for instance. And butterflies have phenomenal vision so it's not like they can't see the mass crucifixion in their midst. I was offended on behalf of the butterflies and thus pleased with my offense. Let the empathizing begin! This volunteering thing was working already. I am a good person, hear me give! — Sloane Crosley

And some of the people i knew were contemplating our circumstances. our circumstances being poorly paid jobs if we worked in the arts, two hours of sleep if we worked in money, and a newfound sense of intellectual inferiority if we worked in publishing. — Sloane Crosley

A human being can spend only so much time outside her comfort zone before she realizes she is still tethered to it. — Sloane Crosley

I can say with a solid degree of authority that I am a selfish person. I spontaneously forget the names of more people than not, unless I want to make out with them. I will take the last square of toilet paper off the roll without thinking twice. I tip taxi drivers so poorly I'm amazed none of them have run over my foot while speeding off. — Sloane Crosley

I hope to one day co-sign a lease with another person but, well, it doesn't plague me that I have yet to do so. Put it this way: I've never had to violently tug at my own pillow at 2 A.M. to get myself to stop snoring. — Sloane Crosley

There's an 'Everything must go!' emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn't there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we're not 'ready?' You don't feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper. — Sloane Crosley

I definitely rediscovered reading for pleasure by devoting such a large swath of my time to sitting on airplanes. I am now painfully adept at removing my shoes so as to have the least amount of foot surface area touching an airport floor. — Sloane Crosley

Everyone has been in a social situation where you say something and it goes unnoticed, then someone else says the same thing and everyone laughs a lot. You learn how to be more creative and whacky and amusing. — Sloane Crosley

She makes several references to Paul making her "burn," almost like she's conjugating verbs. I burn for him. He burns for me. We burn for each other. One cannot help but suspect VD as a factor in their engagement. This comes up again when King defines a "hapahali" as "two people jumping around in the same skin," an image which, like the burning, is disgusting. — Sloane Crosley

Air travel is the safest form of travel aside from walking; even then, the chances of being hit by a public bus at 30,000 feet are remarkably slim. I also have no problem with confined spaces. Or heights. What I am afraid of is speed. — Sloane Crosley

After a breakup, I'll conduct the normal breakup rituals. I'll cut up photographs, erase voice mails, gather his dark concert T-shirts I once slept in and douse them with bleach before I use them to clean my bathtub. — Sloane Crosley

My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles. — Sloane Crosley

The world I describe is about how people live now. It's not about zany people with unlimited, inexplicable funds in an apartment somewhere. — Sloane Crosley

I was surprised by how much I loved Portland. It is so wonderfully creative without being artsy. Great food scene. — Sloane Crosley

I love to bake, so I made vanilla bean and blueberry muffins for sick hospital children. Just kidding! All of that is true except the sick children part. — Sloane Crosley

I can't see the forest through the trees, except the trees are people. — Sloane Crosley

It should be noted that my mother has a long history of being disturbingly unperturbed by what normal people deem perturbing. Certain things simply don't strike her as worthy of a sit-down. — Sloane Crosley

It seemed more and more like something out of a children's book - the butterfly that followed the little girl all the way home to her fifth-floor walk-up. How above-the-law children's books are. Hansel and Gretel (littering, breaking and entering), Rumpelstiltskin (forced labor), Snow White (conspiracy to commit murder), Rapunzel (breach of contract). — Sloane Crosley

I have certain rules that I've established for myself that took a while post-day job to figure out. Everyone says people who freelance or are writers struggle with the structure of it. I'm not allowed to check email before a certain hour. I'm not allowed to run errands during the day. I have to write a certain amount every day. — Sloane Crosley

The good news was that "biology" turned out to be the magic password for working at the Museum of Natural History, just the way "art history" would at the Met or "trust fund" at the MoMA. — Sloane Crosley

Insomniacs tend to fall into two general categories - those who give up and those who don't. I don't. I refuse to admit defeat by turning on the light. I will not try to read or watch a movie, thank you. Productivity is a crutch of the weak. — Sloane Crosley

Juice cleansing has been all the rage for some time. And I used the word 'rage' advisedly; one must push a violent flood of liquidised vegetables and fruit through one's system for at least three days in order to perform a 'cleanse.' — Sloane Crosley

There is a point in most abusive relationships when it occurs to the beaten party that they are guilty of putting their face in the way of someone else's fist. — Sloane Crosley

I do think New York prepares you for the crossection of personalities and realities on display when you leave the country, and I'd live somewhere else if I had a reason or burning-the-the-point-of-discomfort desire to do so. — Sloane Crosley

I have nothing against Canada. I think that Canadians might know the secret to all existence, but to us it just comes off as timid and kind and too nice, and it strikes us as lacking edge. Unless you are hijacking someone and going on a reality show with your eight kids and wearing a velour pink pantsuit, then you have no edge to us. — Sloane Crosley

The Darkness at Irving. Hope to have as much fun doing anything ever as these guys have on stage. — Sloane Crosley

Personal technology has given us the freedom of being able to do whatever we want - and in the case of celebrities and athletes, whomever they want. But it can also serve as a humiliation jetpack. — Sloane Crosley

I have a disproportionate amount of faith in the goodness of the world and that everything will actually work out okay. — Sloane Crosley

In stressful situations, people often talk about a fight-or-flight response. Which, in my opinion, doesn't give enough credit to the more common reaction of curling up into a little ball. [ ... ] For once, I made the decision to play it cool. Or stupid. Whichever came first.
-"Le Paris!" in How Did You Get This Number, by Sloane Crosley (2010), P. 219-220 — Sloane Crosley

For me, nothing brings out my 'born yesterday' idiotic qualities quite like having my photograph taken. — Sloane Crosley

I was pretty dorky, but there are tiers of dorkdom and I always had friends, though they were equally dorky. I was one of those kids who contracted cooties in the second grade and then had cooties, because there wasn't a vaccine for it. When I was around people, though, I generally wanted to make them laugh. I told a lot of stories. — Sloane Crosley

I do want to get married. It's a nice idea. Though I think husbands are like tattoos
you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life instead of just wandering into a tattoo parlor on some idle Sunday and saying, 'I feel like I should have one of these suckers by now. I'll take a thorny rose and a "MOM" anchor, please. No, not that one
the big one. — Sloane Crosley

It's never good to fall in love with someone whom you'd have to stab in the eyeballs to elicit a response. — Sloane Crosley

There's just no concept of layering a thick-sleeved sweater under a coat in L.A. A coat is more of a gesture than a necessity. You know, in case the temperature goes down to 55 degrees. — Sloane Crosley

The nursery rhyme ends when a spider comes along and frightens Miss Muffet straight off her tuffet. I have wondered about what kind of lesson this is for a young girl. If you're eating your curds and whey and a spider comes along, I don't think there's anything wrong with picking up a newspaper, smashing it, and going back to your breakfast. — Sloane Crosley

I don't understand how you can be a decent writer and not know people. — Sloane Crosley

Shortly after this exchange my roommate suggested we start throwing water balloons at the construction workers. Not really at them because, I know, I know, it's not their fault. But believe me, it's hard to look down and see a man with a seven-speed power drill plowing through a brick wall and tell yourself he's not responsible for the noise. — Sloane Crosley

I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn't grow up here. — Sloane Crosley

Every day of my adult life, I have worn at least one piece of jewelry from my maternal grandmother's collection, all of which were manufactured by famed Danish silversmith Georg Jensen. To the naked eye, I am either a Jensen loyalist or a grandmother loyalist. Really I am just a Pretty Things loyalist. — Sloane Crosley

The lies we construct to defend ourselves from humiliation are the strongest, refusing to be torn down. — Sloane Crosley

He also tried to block the doorway when she left him. My mother ducked under his arm, ran to her car, and drove away. I remember thinking that this was somehow romantic, as it pinpointed the actual memory of my mother's departure, something you don't see a lot of in television. Real people don't slam doors without opening them five minutes later because it's raining and they forgot their umbrella. They don't stop dead in their tracks because they realize they're in love with their best friend.They don't say, "I'm leaving you, Jack," and fade to a paper towel commercial. — Sloane Crosley

I thought we had reached an understanding, the institution of marriage and I. Weddings are like the triathalon of female friendship: the Shower, the Bachelorette Party, and the Main Event. It's the Iron Woman and most people never make it through. They fall of their bikes and choke on ocean water. — Sloane Crosley

A lot of people are lonely. A lot of people are lonely even when they're surrounded by other people. — Sloane Crosley

Friendship is a Spackle in itself. You'll forgive your friends a lot, and if you're a woman, you'll forgive your straight male friends even more. They represent the possibility of mutual toleration between the sexes, a keyhole into the mind of the Other, and the promise of one day meeting someone just like them except that you want to sleep with them. — Sloane Crosley

The trick to scrambled eggs is to remove half the milk from the container and shake what's left as hard as you can, like a cocktail shaker, before you whisk it into the eggs. — Sloane Crosley

[He] is the worst kind of asshole they make - the kind who is completely oblivious to how he sounds, the kind who is impossible to argue with because he doesn't allow for a worldview outside of his own. — Sloane Crosley

I still think of Oregon Trail as a great leveler. If, for example, you were a twelve-year-old girl from Westchester with frizzy hair, a bite plate, and no control over your own life, suddenly you could drown whomever you pleased. Say you have shot four bison, eleven rabbits, and Bambi's mom. Say your wagon weighs 9,783 pounds and this arduous journey has been most arduous. The banker's sick. The carpenter's sick. The butcher, the baker, the algebra-maker. Your fellow pioneers are hanging on by a spool of flax. Your whole life is in flux and all you have is this moment. Are you sure you want to forge the river? Yes. Yes, you are. — Sloane Crosley

A pet store is a celebration of dogs' existence and an explosion of options. About cats, a pet store seems to say, 'Here, we couldn't think of anything else.' Cats are the Hanukkah of the animal world in this way. They are feted quietly and happily by a minority, but there's only so much hoopla applicable to them. — Sloane Crosley

The Queen of Crafts herself, Martha Stewart, and I have the same birthday. I prefer to think it's the glue-gun wielding, perfect-tart-producing Martha and not the copper pan-throwing, jail-going Martha. But I suppose if I am going to share a calendar square with some of Martha, I have to share it with all of Martha. — Sloane Crosley

I think husbands are like tattoos
you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life instead of just wandering into a tattoo parlor on some idle Sunday and saying, 'I feel like I should have one of these suckers by now. — Sloane Crosley

love is not boastful. But hate? Apparently hate has a big mouth. — Sloane Crosley

You just don't notice the time line of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. — Sloane Crosley

There is one thing you know for sure, one fact that never fails to comfort you: the worst day of your life wasn't in there, in that mess. And it will do you good to remember the best day of your life wasn't in there, either. But another person brought you closer to those borders than you had been, and maybe that's not such a bad thing. — Sloane Crosley

And there's something about having an especially different name that makes it difficult to imagine what you would be like as a Jennifer. — Sloane Crosley

I was stunned. I pulled the phone away and looked quizzically at the hole-punched speaker. Aside from the blood obligation to be my sister's maid of honor, it had never occured to me that I would get asked to be in anyone's wedding. I thought we had reached an understanding, the institution of marriage and I. Weddings are the like the triathlon of female friendship: the Shower, the Bachelorette Party, and the Main Event. It's the Iron Woman and most people never make it through. They fall off their bikes or choke on ocean water. I figured if I valued my life, I'd stay away from weddings and they'd stay away from me. — Sloane Crosley

I'm a summer baby, so I usually have my birthday as a good summer memory. — Sloane Crosley

As most doctors will tell you, cleansing is ridiculous. You know what's been around longer than that state-of-the-art juicer? Your kidneys. And your liver. Still, the cleanse has recalibrated my definition of a splurge. — Sloane Crosley

When you have a steady and lifelong group of girlfriends, chances are the person you're telling the story to is actually part of the story. — Sloane Crosley

Its remarkable the logic we build around a misapprehension. — Sloane Crosley

Normally, I am a vocal advocate for 'looking both ways' and 'knowing the size of one's own body.' But working, socialising and simply running errands in Manhattan, means I am bound to break my own rules on occasion. — Sloane Crosley

I can feel the tingling in my hand as if I've already slapped her, so right does it feel. — Sloane Crosley

Because, ten-year-olds of the world, you shouldn't believe what your teachers tell you about the beauty and specialness and uniqueness of you. Or, believe it, little snowflake, but know it won't make a bit of difference until after puberty. It's Newton's lost law: anything that makes you unique later will get your chocolate milk stolen and your eye blackened as a kid. Won't it, Sebastian? Oh, yes, it will, my little Mandarin Chinese-learning, Poe-reciting, high-top-wearing friend. God bless you, wherever you are. — Sloane Crosley

The mortality rate among sea horses is not to be believed. Because the difference between a dead sea horse and a living sea horse is imperceptible, selling dead sea horses would make a very good pet store scam. — Sloane Crosley

No one likes a clown who reminds them of why they hate ice-cream-truck music. — Sloane Crosley

One day you turn and "social studies" has become "Chilean fiefdoms of the fourteenth century" and that's how you know you're in college. — Sloane Crosley

Were they making the Kool-Aid in breathable form these days? — Sloane Crosley

You can't possibly fathom the ins and outs of a prepubescent beauty treatment until you've felt the strange but exhilarating tingle of a cottage-cheese-and-Pop-Rocks facial. — Sloane Crosley

Names I am most commonly called by telemarketers: Simone, Slain, Siobhan, Flo, Stacey, Susan, Slater, Leanne, and Slow (Yes, my parents named me "Slow". That's because they hate me and made me sleep in the linen closet subsisting only on bath salts and Scope). — Sloane Crosley

You know what they say: 'Why sit at a table that doesn't have key lime pie on it if you don't have to?' — Sloane Crosley

If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can't afford to be with them. It's not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog, no one tells you what the price is. You set it yourself, and if you're lucky it's reasonable. You have a sense of when you're about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, Enough of this shit. Stop making excuses. No one's that busy at work. No one's allergic to whipped cream. There are too cell phones in Sweden. But most people don't get lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you'll figure out if it's worth it later. — Sloane Crosley

I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information ... my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen, and under the classic caveat of 'loving each other very, very much,' explained that when a man and a woman hug tightly, the man plants a seed in the woman. The seed grows into a baby. Then she sent me to the pantry to get placemats. As a direct result of this conversation, I wouldn't hug my father for two months. — Sloane Crosley

Are there moments when I see unrequited crushes or ex-boyfriends slow dancing with their dates and kind of want to stab myself in the spleen with a salad fork? Yeah, sure. — Sloane Crosley

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture. — Sloane Crosley

Ah, the power of two. There's nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons? — Sloane Crosley

I used to think that nails-down-a-chalkboard was the worst sound in the world. Then I moved on to people-eating-cereal-on-the-phone. But only this week did I stumble across the rightful winner: it's the sound of a baggage carousel coming to a grinding halt, having reunited every passenger on your flight with their luggage, except for you. — Sloane Crosley

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play. — Sloane Crosley

At the end of each year, I sit on the floor and go page by page through the old calendar, inking annual events into the new one, all the while watching my year in 'dinner withs' skate by. When I'm done, I save the old calendar in the box of the new one and put it with the others on a shelf. — Sloane Crosley