Top 296 Quotes & Sayings by Lena Dunham - Page 4

At a brunch potluck, I realize that I do, in fact, hate everybody.

There's a certain grace to having your heart broken.

It's okay to change your mind. About a feeling, a person, a promise of love.

Don't put yourself in situations you'd like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself.

I am thinking particularly of a shower I took where the lower half of my body was under the running water and the upper half was laid out on the bath mat, eating a loaf of bread.

I would rather spend my entire life doing nothing than have my name attached to something mediocre.

I actually didn't enjoy being a child particularly at all even though I had nice parents in a comfortable place to live. Just because I was too confused in generating too many answers for myself that just scared me more.

Of course you don't want anybody to feel shame for their sexuality. But you also want to make it clear that a loud, a loud and proud approach to your sexuality at a young age isn't necessary to be a fully integrated person.

We both followed our hearts and had no choice but to hurt each other deeply.

My fears came true: People called me fat and hideous, and I lived. And now I keep living.

I remember asking my mom, "Do you think that I will ever have enough money to live outside of your house?" And she would be like, "You just never know."

I'm just waiting to be 85 and be in a pajama community. Everyone's welcome to join me.

When I was nine, I wrote a vow of celibacy on a piece of paper and ate it.

I thought about starting a novella club because it seemed less ambitious.

I've always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for.

Basically my new litmus test for people is, do they make me hear about a blow job they gave in the first ten minutes of us talking? And if they didn't then I can feel excited.

I always feel that there are two choices for women. Either be totally confident about your non-size-zero body and say, 'I love what I look like and this is who I am,' or be the person who is obsessed with diet and exercise and keeping toned. What feels more realistic to me is that some days I wake up and think I love how I look. On other days I say, 'If I had real self-control, I would be 10 pounds lighter.' That contradiction is, to me, what being a girl actually feels like.

It's not brave to do something that doesn't scare you.

I kind of look like every other girl walking around.

The way in which you share your body must be a CHOICE. Support these women and do not look at these pictures.

But I want to tell my stories, more than that, I have to in order to stay sane.

I've always been someone in [childhood] period of my life sort of the pains and anxieties of being young are the things that have really stuck with me.

The thing that's so hard about being a kid is you don't have enough knowledge to explain things yourself.

The fact is that I write under duress, often in my bed, often at the last minute. I'm kind of a binge writer I would say, which I don't support. I was always kind of that way. Probably the time I was the most regular as a writer was college. It was like, what else is there to do when you're living in the Midwest studying creative writing?

Throughout the day I often ask myself, Could I fall asleep right now? and the answer is always a resounding yes.

I have work, and then I have a dinner thing. And then I am busy, trying to become who I am.

Calling someone a drama queen is so negative. Why not 'content creator'?

I still go to a party and say something embarrassing to someone, and then write them a weird e-mail about it the next day, and then write them a text because I think they didn't get the e-mail. No matter what happens with your level of success, you still have to deal with all the baggage that is yourself.

Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying.

I seriously consider television to be the people's medium. Like the idea of seeing your parents naked or having somebody go down on you and worrying about whether you smell, or worrying about whether your body is weird or what goes across the face of a person who's supposed to be experiencing pleasure but isn't - those are things I'd love to normalize on TV.

I didn't tell him I was a virgin, just that I hadn’t done it “that much.” It hurt a little more than I'd expected but in a different way, and he was nervous too and he never came. Afterwards we lay there and talked, and I could tell he was a really nice person. I commended myself for making a healthy, albeit hasty, partner choice. I really couldn't wait to tell my mom.

I shared a bed with my sister, Grace, until I was seventeen years old. She was afraid to sleep alone and would begin asking me around 5:00 P.M. every day whether she could sleep with me. I put on a big show of saying no, taking pleasure in watching her beg and sulk, but eventually I always relented. Her sticky, muscly little body thrashed beside me every night as I read Anne Sexton, watched reruns of SNL, sometimes even as I slipped my hand into my underwear to figure some stuff out.

I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn't really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something.

My relationship to eating, my relationship to critiquing my own shape, all of that has changed since I've started viewing my body much more as a tool to do my work.

I can’t imagine a passionate affair with a native man

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, was tortured by. Women I wish to see again, to see them smile and laugh and say, It was all as it should have been.

I don't feel like my work is dependent on my size. I feel like my work is dependent on the fact that I'm an everywoman. I'd be an everywoman if I lost 20 pounds or if I gained 50 pounds, because of my attitude and it's my relationship to the world and the fact that like I have two front teeth that are bigger than the rest of my teeth.

I deserved kisses. I deserved to be treated like a piece of meat but also respected for my intellect.

My dad finds Twitter just infinitely unrelatable. He's like, 'Why would I want to tell anybody what I had for a snack, it's private?!' And I'm like, 'Why would you even have a snack if you didn't tell anybody? Why bother eating?'

I’m not super thin, but I’m thin, for like, Detroit

You don't need to be flamboyant in your life to be flamboyant in your work.

My sister is bold, independent, and not afraid to wear overalls. Some of her first words as a child were "that's not fair," and she's been committed to social justice ever since. She's my hero.

You’ve learned a new rule and it’s simple: don’t put yourself in situations you’d like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself, like that bunny in Runaway Bunny runs to its mother, but you are the mother and you’ll see that later and be very, very proud.

If you watch my movie, you understand I am perverse and weird and angry and not looking to direct a film that ends with a bunch of teenagers exploding into glitter.

I frustrate myself as a writer. There are certain things that I'll think, 'Well, that would be really fun to play... if somebody else was playing this character.'

It's not brave to do something that doesn't scare you. Performing in sex scenes that I direct, exposing a flash of my weird puffy nipple, those things don't fall into my zone of terror.

You should always go where there is a 'you-shaped' hole in the world.

I didn't drink in the essence of the classroom. I didn't take legible notes or dance all night. 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.

I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.

I have to take my shoes off, you guys.

I don’t really read reviews… That’s not where my attention goes.

On Girls I like being a mouthpiece for the issues I think young females face today. It’s always shocking when people question whether it’s a feminist show. How could a show about women exploring women not be? Feminism isn’t a dirty word. It’s not like we’re a deranged group who think women should take over the planet, raise our young on our own and eliminate men from the picture. Feminism is about women having all the rights that men have.

If someone doesn't answer your email within six hours, it means they hate you.

You just have to work, we all have to work really hard to take care of ourselves and feed ourselves good information, just like we feed ourselves good food. Feed ourselves good books and good messaging and the things that make us feel like we can be connected with ourselves and others in a deeper way.

You can't give any exciting speech without misremembering things.

My shape reminds me a lot of my grandmother, whom I was really close to. She died when I was 13, and we have a really similar body type, the squat New England woman who can roll out dough and bring in your lawnmower. That's kind of the vibe of my body, and I'm into it.

I've never thought of myself as an actor, so somebody recognizing me for that would be a real shock.

sometimes I was so bored that I started arguments just to experience the rush of almost losing him.

I went to schools that were small enough that basically everyone was in a play. I played a bouncing ball in a production of Alice in Wonderland and a fat man in an Italian commedia dell'arte play. I was given some small chances.

I always say that I can play sort of six variations on one girl, all of whom are a variation on me. Maybe I'll think of myself as an actor if, like, I do a corset drama.