Sloane Crosley famous quotes

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

#Mother #Baby #Sex

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

#Crazy #Character #Writing

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.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Love You #Being Single #Being Alone

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

#Berlin #Want #Techno

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not.
-- Sloane Crosley

#School #Yearbook #Two

I am starting to like LA, but the concept of a place you have to get used to so much seems a little weird to me. I have been to many foreign cities where I didn't have do acclimatize as much as I did to LA
-- Sloane Crosley

#Cities #Littles #Used

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Reality #Tree #Brain

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

#Creative #Portland #Scene

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

#Clapping

Book tours are such a little tapas meal of where I could live.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Book #Littles #Tapas

No affair that begins with such an orchestrated overture can end on a simple note.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Simple #Affair #Ends

I have come to understand myself as more of a New York writer, or more of a woman writer, but I don't feel like that while I'm writing. But I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn't grow up here.
-- Sloane Crosley

#New York #Growing Up #Writing

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

#Travel #Thinking #Phones

In New York and LA, there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something.
-- Sloane Crosley

#New York #Cutting #Competition

In every woman's wardrobe, there are certain accessories that cannot be separated from their back stories.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Accessories #Stories #Certain

I felt like I wasn't doing justice to either side of my life. It wasn't pronounced. Publicity is an awkward thing to do. It is awkward to call people up all the time and ask them for things on a very basic level.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Justice #People #Awkward

I was diagnosed with a severe temporal spatial deficit, a learning disability that means I have zero spatial relations skills. It was official: I was a genius trapped in an idiot's body.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Zero #Mean #Skills

I think humor is the social use. You can put anything in it. I think - yes, I speak heavily in analogies - it is like putting the medicine in apple sauce or a block of cheese for a dog. Not that anyone in this room is a dog in this scenario.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Dog #Block #Thinking

I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Writing #Two #Voice

Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Differences #Jersey #Curtains

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

#Tattoo #Mom #Husband

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

#Nice #Kids #Reality

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

#Jumping #Two #Cooking

Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Heart #Vintage #People

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

#Phones #Cells #Tears

You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Break Up #Thinking #Way

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

#Problem

I was taught that candles are like house cats - domesticated versions of something wild and dangerous. There's no way to know how much of that killer instinct lurks in the darkness. I used to think the house-burning paranoia was the result of some upper-middle-class fear regarding the potential destruction of a half-million-dollar Westchester house the size of a matchbox. But then I realized the fear stemmed from something far less complex: we're not used to fire. Candles are a staple of the Judaic existence and, like many suburban residents before us, we're pretty bad Jews.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Cat #Thinking #Class

I called my mother immediately to inform her that she was a bad parent. "I can't believe you let us watch this. We ate dinner in front of this." "Everyone watched Twin Peaks," was her response. "So, if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it, too?" "Don't be silly," she laughed, "of course I would, honey. There'd be no one left on the planet. It would be a very lonely place.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Mother #Lonely #Silly

We all deserve to be congratulated, but sadly that would mean there's no one left to do the congratulating.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Mean #Deserve

The children were overwhelmingly morbid. Not a single adult asked me where butterflies go when they die, but this question was more popular than pixie sticks with the under-four-foot set. I cursed parents for not preparing their children. When I was five, my mother and sister sat me up on the kitchen counter and explained the facts of life: the Easter Bunny didn't exist, Elijah was God's invisible friend, with any luck Nana would die soon, and if I ever saw a unicorn, I should kill it or catch it for cash. I turned out okay.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Mother #Easter #Children

The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver's permits, the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one's car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.
-- Sloane Crosley

#School #Keys #Years

There's already a marriage clock, a career clock, a biological clock. Sometimes being a woman feels like standing in the lobby of a hotel, looking at the dials depicting every time zone in the world behind the front desk - except they all apply to you, and all at once.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Careers #World #Sometimes

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

#Emotional #Twenties #Paper

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

#Sweaters #Degrees #Coats

Unless we're talking about old-school, witchcraft-trial violence, can we please phase out the phrase 'girl crush?' While we're at it, if we can axe 'like, total girl crush' unless Total Girl Crush is the name of a fizzy soft drink, in which case I'll take two, thank you.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Thank You #Crush #Girl

We've come to expect so little from online privacy measures that public displays of concern about the matter are more or less for show. Being devastated to discover you've been tagged in somebody else's photo has an air of the melodramatic about it at this point.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Air #Littles #Matter

When I was nine years old, I wrote a short story called 'How to Build a Snowman,' from which no practical snowperson-crafting techniques could be gleaned. The story was an assignment for class and it featured a series of careful but meaningless instructions. Of course, the building of the snowman was a red herring.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Years #Class #Technique

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

#Rocks #Cottages #Cheese

When I was 14, a camp counselor explained what "eating out" was and I vowed to never have it done to me. It seemed cannibalistic and unhygienic. I also remember that she claimed--in front of an entire cabin of girls--to have been "eaten out" by one of the maintenance men in a hot tub. Under hot water. Either something is amiss in my memory of this conversation or she found the most talented man on the planet and all hope is lost for the rest of us.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Girl #Memories #Men

Ladies. Large masses of girls are often prone to this salutation. I hate being mollified with this unsolicited "ladies" business. I know we're all women. I am conscious of my breasts. Do I have to be conscious of yours as well? Do men do this? Do they go, "Men: Meet for ribs in the shed after the game. Keg beer, raw eggs, and death metal only." I would imagine not.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Girl #Hate #Beer

Sometimes we don't know what we want until we don't get it.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Want #Sometimes

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

#Girl #Children #Book

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

#School #Eye #Artist

I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all.
-- Sloane Crosley

#School #Oregon #Facts

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

#Teacher #Believe #Kids

Uniqueness is wasted on youth. Like fine wine or a solid flossing habit, you'll be grateful for it when you're older.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Grateful #Wine #Youth

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

#Party #Ocean #Fall

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

#Girl #Defense #Lame

The search for one's first professional job is not unlike a magical love potion: when one wants to fall in love with the next thing one sees, one generally does.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Falling In Love #Jobs #Doe

I prefer to record all traumas and save them for later, playing them over and over so they can haunt me for a disproportionate number of weeks to come. It's very healthy.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Numbers #Healthy #Records

As we grow up, it feels like you should either invite people into your life or not. There should be fewer and fewer instances of friends you ‘can only take in small doses.’
-- Sloane Crosley

#Growing Up #People #Like You

I spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen to me, which is more or less as pathetic as it sounds.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Waiting #Sound #Pathetic

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

#Lonely #People

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

#Logic #Remarkable

I thought I'd had another few decades before my noise complaint years.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Years #Noise #Complaints

We are only as good as our most extreme experiences
-- Sloane Crosley

#Extremes

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

#Art #Doctors #Definitions

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

#Crush #Ex Boyfriend #Dancing

You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself. 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

#Thinking #Smell #Effort

Sometimes in New York, you're walking down the street and you realize there's a girl walking in front of you whose thighs you could hit a golf ball through, and maybe that makes you depressed.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Girl #New York #Golf

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

#Sleep #Towns #Imperfect

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

#Fun #Guy #Darkness

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Rotten #Truth Is #Novel

You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because... Ooooh. Shiny.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Growing Up #Kids #Order

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

#Break Up #One Day #Way

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

#Love #Memories #Exit

Kids across the country have grown up accepting the idea that no one can harm your family if at least one of its adult members is in the shower. No one knows why.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Country #Kids #Ideas

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

#Names #Different #Would Be

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

#Mother #Memories #Block

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

#Break Up #Crush #Mean

Time grabs you by the scruff of your neck and drags you forward. You get over it, of course. Everyone was right about that. One mathematically insignificant day, you stop hoping for happiness and become actually happy.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Necks #Drag #Over It

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

#Facts #Comfort #Borders

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

#Girl #Thinking #Nurse

Not all shabby is chic, just like not every ***** actor is a star.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Stars #Actors #Chic

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

#Falling In Love #Fall #Eyeballs

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

#Comfort #Realizing #Humans

Because this is the beauty of strangers: we're all just doing our best to help each other out, motivated not by karma but by a natural instinct to help the greater whole.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Karma #Helping #Stranger

When it seems impossible that a deep connection with another person could just go away instead of changing form. It seems impossible that you will one day look up and say the words "I used to date someone who lived in that building," referring to a three-year relationship. As simple as if it was a pizza place that is now a dry cleaner's. It happens. Keep walking.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Simple #Years #Going Away

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

#Lists #Reason

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

#Sex #Sleep #Forgiving

Unless you are a professional, you will find the tart to be a high-maintenance, unforgiving whistle-blower of a pastry.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Maintenance #Pastries #High Maintenance

Because I am a horrible flincher, contact lenses are not an option. I'm always envious of contact-wearers. There are endless reasons to take off one's glasses during the day and, as I have grown older, what I don't see has become increasingly pronounced.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Glasses #Lenses #Reason

I write on weekends, on vacation, and, really - on deadline and on my floor. Both terrible for the back.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Writing #Weekend #Vacation

New Yorkers have a delightfully narcissistic habit of assuming that if they're not conscious of a scene, it doesn't exist.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Narcissistic #Assuming #Habit

Out of all artists, authors are the least trained for the spotlight. Wanting attention isn't a requisite part of the package.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Artist #Attention #Spotlight

Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Country #Real #Cities

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

#People #World #Inexplicable

When you spin a globe and point to a city and actually go to that city, you build an allowance of missed opportunities on the back end.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Opportunity #Cities #Ends

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

#Jobs #Writing #Strange

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

#Keys #Pie #Tables

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'
-- Sloane Crosley

#Christmas #Frustration #Light

For me, titles are either a natural two-second experience or stressful enough to give you an ulcer. If they don't pop out perfect on the first try, they can be really hard to repair. Or, worse, if the author thinks they pop out perfect, but the publishing house does not agree, it's difficult to shift gears. And then? Then you go insane.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Thinking #Two #Giving

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

#Dog #Cat #Animal

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

#Air #Feet #Space

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

#Years #Events #Calendars

Cats and their owners are on a private, exclusive loop of affection. Thus cats have become symbolic of a community eschewed and a hyper-engagement with oneself. They represent the profound danger of growing so independent in New York that it's not merely that you don't need anyone - it's that you don't know how to need anyone.
-- Sloane Crosley

#New York #Cat #Independent

I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job.
-- Sloane Crosley

#Jobs #College #Accepted

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

#Growing Up #Thinking #Calling