First Love Quotes

“Grief is a place you can't travel to without being transformed. You eat the seeds and then you become queen of a land you never even wanted to visit.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Of course, it wasn’t only the smoky cafés themselves that I craved, but everything they represented: gathering places for people who didn’t want to spend their afternoons shopping, communities built around creativity, places and people that let you escape the daily grind to sit still and talk about ideas and ask questions without answers.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“The idea that the very things that have made you feel different and wrong are not only impressive and romantic, but they can connect you with someone else, is intoxicating. Irresistible. It feels like acceptance and absolution, like being fully seen and loved for exactly who you are.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“The Paris that Nin described was the world she had created: It was the people she surrounded herself with and the conversations she had—of course there had never been a time when the whole city was like that, but all along, the Paris (and the New York) I’d craved was there, available to those who knew how to look. The magic of Nin and her writing was not just in the world she inhabited, but in the way she saw it, and her determination to see it that way—“I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation,” she wrote. I understood then that the kind of exultant, creative life where everything is art and the “monotony, boredom, death” of “normal” life is kept constantly at bay is not a place that can be traveled to, or a time I missed out on: It’s a way of living and a way of seeing that Nin was a master of, and that I could be, too.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“It’s true that I’ve never been satisfied with friendships that stay on the surface. That my friends are my family, my truest beloveds, each relationship a world of its own. The best compliment I’ve ever been given was “You’re so many people’s best friend.” Maybe I’ve always sought friendships predicated on deep love and knowing—been unwilling to settle for less—because I learned at such a young age that they’re possible.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“To be in conversation with someone, you must cooperate with them, however briefly, and I have no wish to cooperate with him.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“I would pose the question of whether he hated women specifically, or was just a coward who liked his odds against a twenty-year-old girl better than against another man when the rage in him demanded a target.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“soon I could be one of those grown women who calls her mother her best friend. I’ve always thought it must be so nice to be one of those women, like they never had to fully leave the safety of early childhood.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“The basis of our relationship was always caregiving, so I never felt unsafe even when we were being really wild.” I hadn’t quite made the connection that it was the safety and comfort of our relationship that made the raucousness possible,”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“There was power in subtlety, I was learning; in the simplicity of grounded self-assuredness that doesn’t need to announce itself.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Now I’d graduated, unsure what I was supposed to do next—continue striving for markers of mainstream success, or retreat to the more comfortable fringes, setting aside the costume of professionalism that still felt ill-fitting, tailored for someone else?”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Like all religious and spiritual stories, the connection between menstrual cycles and the moon is an allegory that makes it less scary to be alive. If bleeding once a month makes you part of something celestial and ancient, it’s easier to take cramps in stride.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“The right kind of sad girl is an iteration of one of the oldest feminine tropes there is: the damsel in distress. A sad girl is still lovable, because a sad girl can be rescued. Until it’s too late. A sad girl whose sadness consumes her becomes a tragic, romantic figure. She becomes her pain, and her pain becomes a thing we wrap ourselves in and claim. She becomes an emblem, a vessel, a warning. A patron saint for the next generation of sad girls to worship and emulate. And in the process, her complexity and humanity are annihilated.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Audrey Wollen, who coined the term Sad Girl Theory as a framework for her photography and general creative philosophy, argued that expressing sadness could be a form of resistance to the expectation that girls be pleasant and pliable all the time.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“For the most part I was more angry than sad—at least on the surface. I was a porcupine of a girl, daring anyone to come close enough to be stuck. But under all of that anger was a deep and vast well of sadness. I was feral with grief over my father’s death a few years earlier, but I didn’t quite know it. I just thought I hated everything. Only when I was alone did I feel the roiling sorrow beneath the surface.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“But the self is a tenacious thing. It will allow itself to be submerged, for a time, but there in the murky waters of love, or grief, or addiction, or fear, or whatever you try to drown it in—it waits. It waits for its moment, for the first crack in the surface, and then it struggles forth.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“It was a small interaction—a passing quip and a shared smoke. But it strikes me now that the first thing I ever said to Haley other than my own name was “Me too,” a phrase that would echo back and forth between us through the rest of our friendship as we relished all the ways we were similar, and then began to reshape our personalities and preferences to become more and more alike.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Technically, the first people I loved were my parents. But that’s a different kind of love, an imbalanced love, where the expectation is that most of the care will flow in one direction—at least early on. And it’s something of a given. Not everyone has loving parents in their early life, but when you do, you don’t tend to imagine it could be any other way. Your parents are there like the sun, like bedtime, like sustenance. But the first time you love someone outside that immediate sphere of built-in love, it’s a revelation. Loving Sabina was how I learned what it means to want someone else’s happiness as badly as I want my own. Seeing her arrive somewhere and run toward me right away was how I learned that being loved by someone you love can be the most thrilling feeling in the world.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Technically, the first people I loved were my parents. But that’s a different kind of love, an imbalanced love, where the expectation is that most of the care will flow in one direction—at least early on. And it’s something of a given. Not everyone has loving parents in their early life, but when you do, you don’t tend to imagine it could be any other way. Your parents are there like the sun, like bedtime, like sustenance.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Meanwhile, Sabina was raised with so much structure there was barely space for her to so much as slouch.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“I spent my teenage years seeing how far I could wade out into danger before something stopped me. Fear, pain, death; any kind of limit would do.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“We spent those weeks being kids together—I remember them as the very last days of my childhood, which I’d been halfway out the door and away from but was willing to turn around and stay in just a little longer with Sabina. We made up dances like we used to”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Maybe I’ve always sought friendships predicated on deep love and knowing—been unwilling to settle for less—because I learned at such a young age that they’re possible.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“But what about the first childhood experience of love, the first person you truly love other than your parents? Does a first sisterly love set the bar for a lifetime of friendships?”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“While Wollen wasn’t wrong that society expects girls to swallow their sadness, sadness is still tolerated in a woman far more than anger. An angry woman is dangerous, unpredictable, uncontrollable. She must immediately be punished, shamed, or medicated back into complacency. Anger aims outward, disrupting systems and inconveniencing those in power, whereas we tend to turn our sadness inward, on ourselves—not bothering anyone or making a mess.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship