Stephanie Danler Quotes & Sayings

True, but I like everything," I said.

"That means you like nothing. — Stephanie Danler

When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the wall toward them. — Stephanie Danler

Maybe he knew how I fantasized about living a twenty-four-hour life. — Stephanie Danler

BITTER: always a bit unanticipated. Coffee, chocolate, rosemary, citrus rinds, wine. Once, when we were wild, it told us about poison. The mouth still hesitates at each new encounter. We urge it forward, say, Adapt. Now, enjoy it. — 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

A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet. — Stephanie Danler

A saccharine, sentimental drip ran down my throat, and I was blinded by how stupid I had been not to see that everything was absolutely, one hundred percent going to be okay. — 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

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

I DIDN'T KNOW what a date was and I wasn't an anomaly. Most of the girls I knew didn't get asked out on dates. People got together through alcohol and a process of elimination. — Stephanie Danler

The city was radiant and I felt untouchable. — Stephanie Danler

You think it impresses me that you know how to hurt yourself? — Stephanie Danler

YOU WILL SEE it coming. Not you actually because you don't see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don't take and trite warnings you can't hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came. When — Stephanie Danler

Adorable. I had never seen grown women attack each other so fluently. No one tossed out adorable at Simone. No one declined Chef's tasting menu. And yet Simone wasn't stunned - she was braced. I realized that they were women who knew dangerous things about each other. — 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

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. As — Stephanie Danler

That was the morning I committed the first sin of love, which was to confuse beauty and a good sound track with knowledge. He — Stephanie Danler

Tasting is a farce," she said with her eyes closed, nose deep in the bowl of the glass. "The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and then let it change you. That's the only way to learn anything - you have to live with it. — Stephanie Danler

Unfailingly optimistic: — Stephanie Danler

There are many romantic reasons to watch the sunrise. Once it started, it was hard to leave. I wanted to own it. I wanted it to be a confirmation that I was alive. Most of the time, however, it felt condemning. — Stephanie Danler

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

Hey, new girl. You know the straw that broke the camel's back? Is that the same thing as the last straw? — Stephanie Danler

Aging is peculiar," she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. "I don't think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy - when the books, clothes, bars, technology - when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you're abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away? — Stephanie Danler

You know what I dislike? When people use the future as a consolation for the present. I don't know if there is anything less helpful. — Stephanie Danler

Your self-awareness is lacking," Simone said to me one day as I was leaving. "Without an ability to see yourself, you can't protect yourself. Do you understand? It's crucial to your survival that you pause the imaginary sound track in your head. Don't isolate your senses- you're interacting with an environment. — Stephanie Danler

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. — Stephanie Danler

I wanted to say, My life is full. I chose this life because it's a constant assault of color and taste and light and it's raw and ugly and fast and it's mine. And you'll never understand. Until you live it, you don't know. — Stephanie Danler

Our binges on each other were constructing something behind our backs: the stubborn stains of intimacy marked our hands. — Stephanie Danler

It is a strange pressure to be across from a man who wants something that you don't want to give. It's like standing in a forceful current, which at first you think is not too strong, but the longer you stand, the more tired you become, the harder it is to stay upright. — Stephanie Danler

When you're older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn't have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. — Stephanie Danler

Any business transaction - actually any life transaction - is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel. — Stephanie Danler

Life is what happens when you're waiting. — Stephanie Danler

I had never thought of a tomato as a fruit - the ones I had known were mostly white in the center and rock hard. But this was so luscious, so tart I thought it victorious. So - some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning. — Stephanie Danler

It was Simone who used to say, on her better days, "Don't worry, little one, none of this will leave a scratch. — Stephanie Danler

The city does sleep, the windows darken and the streets vacate. New York dreams us. Wild, somnambulistic creatures, we move unhurried toward our own disappearance at dawn. — Stephanie Danler

Your sense are never inaccurate- it's your ideas that can be false. — Stephanie Danler

Do you see how, up close, it's blurry and passionate? And from a distance, whole? — Stephanie Danler

Salting the most nuanced of enterprises, the food always requesting more, but the tipping point fatal. — Stephanie Danler

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

My life is full. I chose this life because it's a constant assault of color and taste and light and it's raw and ugly and fast and it's mine. — Stephanie Danler

We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared. — Stephanie Danler

What you think, everyone look, Alice just wake up and oh fuck, no wonderland. — Stephanie Danler

I had a ritual - and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York - to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings. — Stephanie Danler

We called them the Nine-to-Fivers. They lived in accordance with nature, waking and sleeping with the cycle of the sun. Mealtimes, business hours, the world conformed to their schedule. The best markets, the A-list concerts, the street fairs, the banner festivities were on Saturdays and Sundays. They sold out movies, art openings, ceramics classes. They had evenings to waste. The watched the Super Bowl, they watched the Oscars, they made reservations for dinner because they ate dinner at a normal time. They brunched, ruthlessly, and read the Sunday Times on Sundays. They moved in crowds that reinforced their citizenship: crowded museums, crowded subways, crowded bars, the city teeming with extras for the movie they starred in.

They were dining, shopping, consuming, unwinding, expanding while we were working, diminishing, being absorbed into their scenery. That is why we -- the Industry People -- got so greedy when the Nine-to-Fivers went to bed. — Stephanie Danler

No, cool is fine," he said. "Yes, it's a cool place. It was much cooler seven years ago, and it was actually cool ten years ago, before I even got to the city. You see, what those kids over there" - he pointed at the empty booth - "don't realize is that cool is always past tense. The people who lived it, who set the standards they emulate, there was no cool for them. There was just the present tense: there were bills, friendships, messy fucking, fucking boredom, a million trite decisions on how to pass the time. Self-awareness destroys it. You call something cool and you brand it. Then - poof - it's gone. It's just nostalgia. — Stephanie Danler

It's compulsive but we actually find the painful repetition pleasurable." He took another sip. "It doesn't sound pleasurable." "It's how we self-soothe. How we maintain the illusion that we are in control of our lives. For example, you repeat 'Pick up' in hopes that the outcome each time will be different. And you are repeatedly embarrassed, are you not?" He waited for me to respond but I wouldn't meet his eyes. "You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It's our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure." Every time Howard looked at me I felt bare. — Stephanie Danler

Lust rubied my blood, gave me the gait of an uncaught criminal, and I felt like I could walk forever. — Stephanie Danler

It's brave if you make it, foolish if you fail. — 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

God, how I loved him. Not him exactly, let me try again: I loved his ghost. — Stephanie Danler

didn't know what a date was and I wasn't an anomaly. Most of the girls I knew didn't get asked out on dates. People got together through alcohol and a process of elimination. If they had anything in common beyond that they would go out and have a conversation. — Stephanie Danler

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. — Stephanie Danler

When you can't see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them. — Stephanie Danler

Sundays had a candid feeling. There were no laws, no stakes. — Stephanie Danler

Veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine — Stephanie Danler

You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It's our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure. — Stephanie Danler

Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in. We've tamed, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood. — Stephanie Danler

You knew what was playing at Film Forum, and you corrected anyone who lumped Godard and Truffaut together. — Stephanie Danler

As I contemplated the skyline this double feeling came to me as one thought, pressing in from either side of the bridge, impossible for me to reconcile: It is ludicrous for anyone to live here and I can never leave. — Stephanie Danler

Girls, now, they wear leggings. As pants. It's embarrassing. Just parading their coochies around town. — Stephanie Danler