Stray Quotes

“I’ve loved some very sad people in my life and hurt myself trying to get them to change. They didn’t, and I have no business being surprised by it. People will tell you who they are. It takes an emergency for some of us to listen.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“We don’t receive the things we want because we deserve them. Most of the time we get them because we are blind and lucky. It’s in the act of having, the daily tending, that we have an opportunity to become deserving. It’s not a place to be reached. It is a constant betwixt and between. It’s in that hollow, liminal space that I think—hope?—humility can be achieved.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“Epiphanies aren’t lightning bolts. They are a hummed note, a prayer mumbled constantly, brought to the surface given the right conditions. It’s as if I am always hearing three ways, first shallowly, collecting, then one level deeper as I’m processing, and finally, I am hearing with my body, which is when I’m hearing myself. That’s one way, for me, information combines with experience and becomes knowledge. I wish there were a shortcut.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“Boundaries help. It’s through boundaries that we construct ourselves, say, Here is where you end and I begin. However, while boundaries are powerful, they’re unfortunately not solid. They are made in the imagination, and there are inherent flaws in arming oneself for battle in our fantasies. What is shocking isn’t that we have lived through the traumas of our lives. The miracle is that we are still remotely permeable.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“Happiness is a filter I apply in hindsight. A wash of color over a span of recollected time. But he is teaching me to name things that move me. Coastal live oaks. Poppies and lupin. Arroyos. When I get in the car with the Love Interest to explore some fabled part of this state, I feel alert, aroused, and at peace. I think this feeling must be very, very close to happiness.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“Epiphanies aren’t lightning bolts. They are a hummed note, a prayer mumbled constantly, brought to the surface given the right conditions.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“With age came not self-knowledge but the ability to give myself things, to actualize ideas, to create. That is the power of adulthood I didn’t imagine, and it’s a hard-earned privilege.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“I want to know what “just” a love story is. It’s in loving that we learn that our blind spots are nearly always our undoing.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“I’m not getting my father back. Not because he’s dead, or because he’s an addict. But because he was never there to begin with.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“And this is Los Angeles, a town full of oracles, con men, real estate speculators, all high on self-delusion, self-gratification, marijuana, and a shitload of quartz.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“Why do we continue to love this fading world?”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray

“early on, and Alex and I accidentally get really drunk. We have a way of drinking with each other, impassioned and innocent, and then whoops, we’re wasted. We strip”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“But when I trace the images Ruscha captured, I'm reminded that it's the way we look, how we organize the world and name it, that creates beauty.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray

“One time after sex, the Love Interest asked me if I was happy. I was so surprised by that question, its baldness, I said, I don't know how to answer that. I still don't. Happiness is a filter I apply in hindsight. A wash of color over a span of recollected time. But he is teaching me to name things that move me. Coastal live oaks. Poppies and lupin. Arroyos. When I get in the car with the Love Interest to explore some fabled part of this state, I feel alert, aroused, and at peace. I think this feeling must be very, very close to happiness.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray

“To visit with her, I make myself microscopic. I'm hidden away in a recess of my body (my shoulder, my rib) and I don't think things that will hurt me.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray

“Tabula rasa. That's something I miss about my restaurant friends: they didn't ask why I never went home for the holidays, only cared if I could pick up their shift. I miss that shared understanding of evasion.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray

“That is what children do - they investigate reality by contrasting it with fantasy.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray

“choice has always been the antidote to fate.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“We were driving up to Palos Verdes from Long Beach after a day of second grade. I was eight years old. I had written, illustrated, and turned in a story that required my grandmother’s presence at school, a substitution for my mother who was always at work. We met with Sister Mary, the principal, and Sister Bernadette, the nice one, and the school nurse. As we drove home, my grandmother asked me to read the offending piece aloud. In the story, it is an October night. Five girls are invited to a slumber party. Each girl has a defining characteristic: one of them is sporty, one is brainy, one is shy, one of them is the most beautiful and the leader. One of them is the orphan. During the slumber party the girls play with a Ouija board and detect the existence of spirits. They perform a séance to entreat the spirits to come closer. They perform “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board,” lifting the Orphan with their fingertips because she is the smallest. All the lights go out and she ascends toward the ceiling. They are successful. The Orphan drops down to the floor, unconscious. She wakes up and realizes that she is not alone. She has been possessed by an evil spirit, her twin who died when they were in the womb. The Evil Twin begins to twist her thoughts, then her words. The Orphan knows it will make her do awful things, turn her into someone she doesn’t want to be. She goes to the kitchen, where the mother of one of the girls is cooking. The Evil Twin tells her to pick up a knife. The Orphan picks it up. The Evil Twin tells her to use the knife to kill the mother, then her friends. The Orphan stabs herself in the chest instead. The End, I said. I watched for my grandmother’s reaction. From this vantage point it doesn’t take a psychologist to see how terrified I was by what might seize me. There was already a split in me: disorder, abandonment. I leaned into the gothic to illustrate what I couldn’t articulate. At eight years old, I unconsciously understood the function of symbols. I mimicked my favorite writer, Poe, but with this story I had taken the perilous and grandiose first step of making it my own. Did I already know that art could make sense of madness? Did my grandmother? Her navy Cadillac was at a stoplight. There was a Pavilions supermarket behind her, a row of eucalyptus trees, an air-conditioned stream through the car that made my nose run. She looked at me, so directly I flinched, and she said, Never stop writing.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“have to believe it’s possible to be a victim and not live a victimized life.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“This is just how things ended up for me.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“It’s so much easier to have compassion for others than ourselves.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“I know that as he fell into his black hole, he prayed. Thinking of his eventual death didn’t hurt me, perhaps because I had been preparing for it for so many years. When it came, it would be a mercy. The thing I felt most acutely when I thought of him dying, was shame that he would die on the dark side of his life. Not in his home or in the mountains he loved. He would die nameless, in his ghostly world that he could never bring to light.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“Grieving the living feels like an infinite state, until you remember that it ends in regular grieving.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“We do the best we can with what we’re given.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“People often act against common sense when they’ve fallen in love with a fantasy.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“We discussed how Laurel Canyon has only one way in and one way out—single ingress and egress, is what they call it—which means that not only would the road be swarmed with cars trying to evacuate, it would also be impossible for emergency vehicles to get in.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir

“The Monster is who I would be if I were a man and had better control over my feelings: loving when I felt like it, ruthlessly irreverent and impolite, ease greasing up all the gears of my life.”
― Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir