Famesick Quotes

“Never mistake maintenance for care, attention for love, or even love for empathy.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“We cling to our tragedy just as tightly as we cling to the things we love most. Airtight explanations for what ails us.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“It’s easy to set fires in a life that seems like a simulation.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“It feels as if I was born with the endless souls of generations of tipsy, provocative, women inside me.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“If you wrote an abstract painting or a Bundt cake or a sports car into an episode, it would appear, like everything Harold drew with his magical purple crayon.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“the triad of illness, trauma, and addiction was more than I had been able to bear. Everything that had happened publicly was harder than I let on. But it was real. It could be clearly laid out on a timeline, like in a history book or a true crime podcast. I always struggled physically, but my symptoms, which seemed diffuse, were never collated into a diagnosis, especially in a world where the pain of girls and women is dismissed. Stress has a measurable effect on autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, and worsened my physical symptoms, so ironically making Girls—arguably the best thing that had ever happened to me, but also the hardest I had ever worked—only served to make me sicker. But by this point, my responsibilities made taking the time to get well seemingly impossible.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“I know who you are,” a twenty-year-old with self-harm scars on her inner arms and a T-shirt that said Cherry Bomb tittered as I reached for a glass of water in the shared kitchen.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“And through it all, the pain was there, like that friend with a borderline personality who you’re convinced you can control until it becomes clear she’s going to do to you what she’s done to all the others. There was no moment of any hour of any day where I did not feel pain. It assumed different forms and different levels of intensity. It had different shapes and versions. But it was always with me. I was tethered to it like a smoker to their pack, mollusks to a whale, a mother to their baby.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“At an art book fair with my father, I watched a couple my age share a taco and fight, both of them in ripped jean shorts. As their volume raised—something about which of two parties they’d been invited to that night they’d attend, and whether they could go to both—my eyes filled with tears, as though I were watching a film of what my life could have been.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“He was part of it, but I was most of it. It
was the shift in me that was making this experience—one of pleasure, not
guilty pleasure or rageful pleasure or pleasure that pulsed with a deeper,
unspoken need—possible.

I finally understood, in some exquisite way, the cost of all these years
spent dividing myself in two: little whore or Jack’s baby girl. Needy slut or
loving wife. Grateful fat girl or feminist boss. I couldn’t do it anymore. It
hurt too much, to cleave myself from myself. I just wanted to be in my
body. And there I was.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“He reminded me less of a Hollywood uber-producer than of Howie”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“These girls are overeducated and underemployed”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“my grandmother the only one willing to entertain the increasingly complex lies of a junkie—but this was the first time it occurred to me that some people never come back. Sometimes, they run out of time.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“I understood now that trying to understand why two people fall out of love is a bit like studying a place that existed before photographs, pre–printing press, a time that is kept alive only by the stone foundations of burnt cottages and buried barrels of mead found by determined archaeologists or lucky farmers. We may have the evidence—the daily messages exchanged between former partners (“baby cakes, do you like these curtains or do they make you think of Vegas?”), the iPhone images of early courtship (hands entwined on the plane to a new city), and the devolution (absent-eyed in New Year’s hats that read 2017 in hopeful glitter). But we can never be the people who occupied that place.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“when we couldn’t get over the dreamy feeling of showing up every day to do the job you’d always dreamed of.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“but the tears rolled down someone else’s cheek, and I felt someone else’s hand wipe them away.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“driving home with Adam at dawn and drinking coffee on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, talking about our childhoods and our deepest fears, and the way he would look at me, shake his head, and say something laden with meaning or potentially meaningless like “You’re really something else.” I remember the boundless creativity that television seemed to allow, not to mention the wonder: If you wrote an abstract painting or a Bundt cake or a sports car into an episode, it would appear, like everything Harold drew with his magical purple crayon.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“Everything that had happened publicly was harder than I let on. But it was real. It could be clearly laid out on a timeline, like in a history book or a true crime podcast. I always struggled physically, but my symptoms, which seemed diffuse, were never collated into a diagnosis, especially in a world where the pain of girls and women is dismissed. Stress has a measurable effect on autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, and worsened my physical symptoms, so ironically making Girls—arguably the best thing that had ever happened to me, but also the hardest I had ever worked—only served to make me sicker.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“He was taking it surprisingly well. People just like to feel seen.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“where—like so many men before him—he slept with only a coverless duvet and a Pulp Fiction poster.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“heretofore”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“When given the choice about whether to displease someone and protect myself or help someone and exhaust myself, I would almost always land on option C: hurt myself badly, even though no one had really asked me to do that. I wanted, I know now, to be loving and loved, to be needed and necessary, to be so generous that I was above censure and so kind that I was above being subjected to anyone’s cruelty.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“but at the time, it felt like one small step for me, one huge step for womankind. It’s that kind of hubris that defines being a young artist, and which should never be beaten out of anyone.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick