Famesick Quotes

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

“Their goal had been to preserve my fertility. That was what they had considered their primary job. For many doctors, it was a calling above curing pain, above making life livable for the person suffering now. Our whole culture values the potential of life more than the existence of it, and women as vessels for that life more than as sentient beings.”
― 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

“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

“Looking back, this may be the moment my body started to scream—sure I wouldn’t listen, sure I couldn’t listen, it took the job upon itself of stopping me in my tracks.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“Our whole culture values the potential of life more than the existence of it, and women as vessels for that life more than as sentient beings.”
― 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

“These girls are overeducated and underemployed”
― 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 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

“I used to try so desperately to distinguish emotional pain from physical pain, psychic distress from the siren calls my nerve endings seemed to send out day and night. It was so important to me that they be separate, that nobody consider my body’s revolt to be the result of my mind’s disorganization. It never occurred to me that as my body disintegrated, it was speaking to me, and that it got louder when I refused to listen. It was telling me—because I refused to see the signs, heed the warning lights—what I couldn’t let myself know about the empty places I had been taken just because I was full of the desire to make art. It knew that fame held only disillusionment and isolation. It knew that the people who loved me when I was up were not going to hold me when I was down. It was certain, even though I could not be, that this was not the “more” I had always thought I was destined for. It was telling me that I didn’t have to cooperate with my own commodification, that I was allowed to stop. That, in fact, soldiering on didn’t prove I was worthy of all I’d been given. It only proved that I was as dense as my detractors told me I was. ...”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“You’re the goose that lays the golden egg,” my father had once told me during Girls. He didn’t mean it in a nice way. He meant that the goose may be well-fed, well-nourished, coddled, and celebrated. But nobody protects that goose because they love it—they protect the eggs. And if the goose fails to make eggs, it goes from being a coddled pet to having its head chopped off faster than you can say “duck liver pâté.” Never mistake maintenance for care, attention for love, or even love for empathy.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“You know you’ve made it in this town when your phone stops ringing.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“You know, all I used to do was work. It was my religion—I wanted more and more, to be better and better. When I got sick, I thought my life was over.” “And it wasn’t?” “It was just starting. Because if it hadn’t happened, I would never have stopped, and I would never have known just how much all of you love me.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“When I got sick, I thought my life was over.” “And it wasn’t?” “It was just starting. Because if it hadn’t happened, I would never have stopped, and I would never have known just how much all of you love me.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“And after an awkward perusal of menus, Bruce looked up at me with eyes so clear, I knew he saw my secret garden and said, “Since we last saw each other, Jack has become very special to me.” Reader, sometimes you see two doors in life, one marked “NORMAL BEHAVIOR” and one marked “PSYCHO STUFF.” And after a brief pause, to really consider what’s best, you choose…psycho stuff. And that is what I did. That is what I have so often done. From my mouth came a font of verbal diarrhea that sounded something like this: “I’m glad he’s special to you because he promised to love me forever and that’s not how it turned out and I may not have been perfect but I would have tried and tried and now he shames me just for existing and I’m going to write a memoir one day and I don’t know how not to just call it I HATE YOU Jack, you BROKE ME Jack.” Bruce Springsteen could have done a lot of things in this moment. He could have ignored me. He could have politely excused himself to the bathroom. He could have demanded to switch seats or had me thrown out or yelled, “GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, GIRL. THIS IS NOT THE LADIES’ ROOM. GET A TAMPON AND GET A LIFE.” Instead, he looked at me with the gentlest eyes, eyes that crinkled with all the charm that our nation’s creative father should exude, and said: “Well, Lena, this is the hard stuff. These are the questions artists must ask ourselves. And none of us had that answer, about how best to express our hurt through art. But when I was writing my memoir, I told myself this, again and again. First off, if it’s boring, stop writing it.” He laughed self-effacingly. “And second, you don’t owe it to people to be honest about every little thing. That doesn’t mean you lie—it just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show ’em how your mind works.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“Reader, sometimes you see two doors in life, one marked “NORMAL BEHAVIOR” and one marked “PSYCHO STUFF.” And after a brief pause, to really consider what’s best, you choose…psycho stuff.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“I would ask him to use a very specific white, which was actually a mix of two whites. “Satin finish for the woodwork, matte everywhere else.”
― 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

“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

“Don’t you get it?” my father said, on the third day I refused to get out of bed. “You’ve won. You’re only twenty-eight, and you’ve been called a racist, a fat whore, an ignorant rich girl, and a child molester. What else is left? Nothing. You’ve won.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“My mom’s old art school friend Robert had a saying: “You know you’ve made it in this town when your phone stops ringing.” Robert had made a small fortune in the ’80s, designing and licensing housewares to midlevel department stores across America. While the rest of their cohort scraped by, he bought a massive house in Greenwich and a duplex in SoHo, shopped at Double RL, and vacationed in castles in Morocco. The fact that he died at fifty-nine after being shot up with heroin in the bathtub by a twenty-year-old he was dating, only to have his house pillaged for diamonds before any family could arrive, was not particularly comforting. The fact is, I still wanted my phone to ring.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“Then I went back to bed, spilled a Mexican Coke on my sheets, cleaned up the mess with one of my nice towels, and then left it wadded up on the floor.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“If you make yourself out to be a bottomless resource, people will frack. They can’t help it. There are so many people with so many needs who think—often rightly—that the world wasn’t made for them. We all have to try and get it where we can.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“Perhaps other people who become famous have an easier time with this. They may have grown up with a sense of their own worth, or maybe grown up with nothing and so know to protect what they have. They may be well-adjusted enough to know, and live the phrase “not my circus, not my monkeys.” Maybe when other people bark, they bite. But none of these was me. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too—to have this big, impossible life and be loved by everyone I met in the process.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“Before I could respond, he wrested my cup from me, removing the soaking tea bag and placing it in the pocket of his jeans, where a wet mark began to expand.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick

“Our writer’s room had been in session for about a week. We were using a conference room on the ground floor of Judd’s office—aptly named the Apatower. It wasn’t particularly glamorous—it had a massive whiteboard and sat next to the unused company gym (as Judd once told me, “Never trust a buff comedian”), but I loved it. The room was a chance to spend time in a room of the funniest people you’d ever met, telling the funniest stories and figuring out what to have for lunch—what could be better? I had been initially resistant to a room, as I did my best writing in bed, late, alone. But Judd and Jenni had convinced me, and it really did feel like being at the coolest table in high school and getting paid for it.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick