Top 100 Carrie Brownstein Quotes
#1. Chemistry cannot be manufactured or forced, so Wild Flag was not a sure thing, it was a 'maybe,' a 'possibility.' But after a handful of practice sessions, spread out over a period of months, I think we all realized that we could be greater than the sum of our parts.
Carrie Brownstein
#2. Anything that isn't traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly. I
Carrie Brownstein
#3. I think in some ways, whether you've ever actually been to Portland, people definitely understand this highly curated niche lifestyle, because a lot of people are sort of striving for that now. Or they're hating on it.
Carrie Brownstein
#4. For film and television, it's interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It's not just about being a fan, it's about how you perform your fandom. That's always been interesting to me.
Carrie Brownstein
#5. It turns out I'm not very good at working with a traditional boss.
Carrie Brownstein
#6. Finding a partner who understands the vicissitudes of travel is challenging. A nomadic life fosters inconsistencies and contradictions within you - a vacillation between loneliness and needing desperately to be left alone.
Carrie Brownstein
#7. People are wearing fleece, which is a hard fabric to be angry in.
Carrie Brownstein
#8. The internet is just a scary place. It's better to just go to the doctor. Don't let Google get inside your head. It will do bad things to you.
Carrie Brownstein
#9. My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness.
Carrie Brownstein
#10. There is a direness in the construction of safety, in the telling of theretofore untold stories.
Carrie Brownstein
#11. I've mostly been focusing on writing, and I've really enjoyed not playing music. It will always be part of my life, but I don't feel the immediate need to be playing for people.
Carrie Brownstein
#13. No matter what people are struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don't wish smallness for anyone. It's a terrible place to live.
Carrie Brownstein
#14. I like to connect with people through my work. That's my favorite way - meetings of the minds, fans at a show. Those are nice mediated ways of hanging out.
Carrie Brownstein
#15. I think short-term goals are important. Trying to set a missive for yourself for the entire year can be daunting, and it can feel too easy to fail or fall short of that.
Carrie Brownstein
#17. I would love to do a reunion tour if it only involved basements across the U.S.
Carrie Brownstein
#18. I have no problem spending money on a great meal with friends or a flight to see somebody that I love, versus something like a fancy car. I don't need a fancy car. I don't need a giant TV.
Carrie Brownstein
#19. It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.
Carrie Brownstein
#22. I feel like I came in comedy's side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways.
Carrie Brownstein
#23. To me, curiosity is married to optimism. And that's where a lot of my motivation comes from. A lot of my way out of depression and anxiety is that intersection between optimism and curiosity. Because it means taking a step forward with the hope that there will be discovery.
Carrie Brownstein
#25. Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.
Carrie Brownstein
#26. We would go out and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted.
Carrie Brownstein
#27. It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.
Carrie Brownstein
#28. After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.
Carrie Brownstein
#29. Practice. Learn and then unlearn - that's the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can't merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process.
Carrie Brownstein
#30. Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I'm not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing.
Carrie Brownstein
#31. For me, being in shape means, like, not having cynicism out-weigh optimism on a daily basis.
Carrie Brownstein
#32. Twitter is sort of version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It's the way of calling things out for what they are, wearing badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.
Carrie Brownstein
#33. Music has always been my constant, my salvation. It's cliche to write that, but it's true.
Carrie Brownstein
#34. For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.
Carrie Brownstein
#35. But there are also much less dire reasons to have a manager, reasons that may have been useful to us but that we willfully ignored, or were just too stubborn or parsimonious to try.
Carrie Brownstein
#36. I got kind of tired of playing, I think. But I think it will be part of my life again, maybe.
Carrie Brownstein
#37. With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I'm able to go with 'Portlandia' has a wider range, but also a brighter range.
Carrie Brownstein
#38. There are foods you should avoid. For me, sugar is a no. Because it gives me a spike and then a crash.
Carrie Brownstein
#39. I realized my yearning had little to do with place and more with the fact that I continually made a ritual of emptiness. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I would always feel a certain deficit. Like before, as a way to fill the hole, I began writing songs. Music began to restore me again.
Carrie Brownstein
#40. I like how blogging emulates fandom because it's so completist and spontaneous. It really mirrors the way people listen to music, and I like that fluidity with online content.
Carrie Brownstein
#41. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high. Stephen
Carrie Brownstein
#42. I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.
Carrie Brownstein
#43. With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.
Carrie Brownstein
#44. You can't bury a part of yourself that's so innate to who you've been, even if it's not for the sake of anything other than a pure enjoyment of it.
Carrie Brownstein
#45. I've always loved writing. Doing that at the same time as playing music can be tiring.
Carrie Brownstein
#46. At nineteen, you can make out for hours, that goal-less, amorphous melting into someone else.
Carrie Brownstein
#47. I've realized that I have a lot of different loves, and I want to pursue writing, but I can never divorce myself from music.
Carrie Brownstein
#48. Once you're away from music, I realize that's as intrinsic to who I am as anything else. That's the part that takes me out of my brain.
Carrie Brownstein
#49. I'm all about being prudent. And I've started to appreciate experiences more than actual objects.
Carrie Brownstein
#50. To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness. Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degress of experience - to immerse without judgment. It's like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.
Carrie Brownstein
#51. Yet I felt it was unfair to be labeled when I had yet to find a label for myself, and when binary, fixed identities held no meaning or safety for me.
Carrie Brownstein
#52. We felt there was a creeping tepidness in music, a cloying softness, as if music were only a salve, not an instigator. It's
Carrie Brownstein
#53. The fact that people go to Portland to visit a tiny feminist bookstore-no matter what the impetus is for them getting there-the fact that they go in there and look around and shop for books or stationery or whatever, is a major source of pride for me,
Carrie Brownstein
#54. Living in Olympia, we had lost perspective on what a traditional group looked or sounded like; band configurations were abnormal, either multi-limbed or conspicuously amputated.
Carrie Brownstein
#55. I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.
Carrie Brownstein
#56. You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.
Carrie Brownstein
#58. I think hypochondria always plays a part in the healthcare landscape.
Carrie Brownstein
#59. There are times that a work exists for the sake of getting you to the next step, as a testing ground for ideas, for recognizing parts if your process that were theretofore unnoticed or undiscovered.
Carrie Brownstein
#60. Plus, it seemed inconceivable to give someone money for a job we were capable of doing.
Carrie Brownstein
#61. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited;
Carrie Brownstein
#62. The notion of "female" should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself.
Carrie Brownstein
#63. I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.
Carrie Brownstein
#64. Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock 'n' roll - it's the same steps with different degrees of difficulty.
Carrie Brownstein
#65. Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived.
Carrie Brownstein
#66. I don't want to know what's going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it's a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it's also disheartening and usinspiring.
Carrie Brownstein
#68. Sometimes I think that the best you can ever feel in a photo shoot is like a sexy clown.
Carrie Brownstein
#69. I love coffee. I love a midday espresso on set, just for the energy.
Carrie Brownstein
#70. To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm.
Carrie Brownstein
#71. I have to erase my Google search histories, because they always lead to an obituary.
Carrie Brownstein
#72. Here I was in a group of women, allies, I thought, colleagues, and I felt like I was being shamed for the relatively modest success I had achieved. But Instead of sticking up for myself, I apologized.
Carrie Brownstein
#73. What I value most in new music is strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that.
Carrie Brownstein
#74. I think that there's always an assumption, when a band goes on hiatus or stops playing, that there's some acrimony brewing under the surface.
Carrie Brownstein
#75. There is something freeing in seeing yourself in a new context. People have no preconceived notion of who you are, and there is relief in knowing that you can re-create yourself.
Carrie Brownstein
#76. The hedonistic lifestyle is difficult to achieve when you're still carrying your own gear. Trust me that you don't feel glamorous with a 60-pound amp in your arms; it's a lot less sexy than toting a vodka gimlet and impossible to do in heels.
Carrie Brownstein
#77. I always felt that the most common thread in my life from when I was young until now has been a highly observant, very analytical mind.
Carrie Brownstein
#78. The inexplicable is its own form of freedom. Belonging is not a form of restriction. We can't name the feeling but we can sing along.
Carrie Brownstein
#79. The natural world operates by its own set of rules. The animal world, all the places that are feral and ungovernable, that's where I find a lot of inspiration. There is just as much beauty there, but there is also decay and violence.
Carrie Brownstein
#80. Art communities and music scenes want to pretend like they don't care, but they will also tell you louder and more frequently than anyone that they DON'T CARE.
Carrie Brownstein
#81. Just invest in apps. Just download apps and then pay yourself the dividend.
Carrie Brownstein
#82. (Like a lot of middle-class kids, I needed my punk rock and rebellion underwritten by my parents.)
Carrie Brownstein
#83. I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres.
Carrie Brownstein
#85. From a self-conscious standpoint, it's hard to see myself on a screen in a way that isn't just me playing music or doing something silly.
Carrie Brownstein
#86. It was about knowing you were going to be underestimated by everyone and then punishing them for those very thoughts.
Carrie Brownstein
#87. To me, ugliness, grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things.
Carrie Brownstein
#88. I'm interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young. I've never quite been able to shake that.
Carrie Brownstein
#89. I'll admit that I'm not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast.
Carrie Brownstein
#90. I'm really drawn to the uncompromising realness of natural process: It's unadorned. It's not very pretty.
Carrie Brownstein
#91. I could turn up the volume on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions that seemed up until that point to be uncontrollable, even amorphous.
Carrie Brownstein
#92. I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden.
Carrie Brownstein
#93. You do have to live through things, and to live through things is to observe want, and to observe lacking. Even if the hunger is a curiosity.
Carrie Brownstein
#94. I've learned to really enjoy video games. It's really toxic to have in your house, because it's really distracting.
Carrie Brownstein
#95. At that age I thought apartments were built specifically to house the single or the newly single, a divorce dormitory of sorts.
Carrie Brownstein
#96. To really be tortured by a song, it needs to be more than just something you don't like or don't get; it has to make your skin crawl by getting under it. Strangely, that last clause could describe provocative or daring music, as well.
Carrie Brownstein
#97. Nothing is as nice as plugging in your guitar and turning up the volume really loud, just seeing what kind of beautiful noise you can make with it.
Carrie Brownstein
#98. My story starts with me as a fan. And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved. All the affection I poured into bands, into films, into actors and musicians, was about me and my friends.
Carrie Brownstein
#99. There is a stillness about the past, a clarity, the way it had been somewhat defined and dissected, in the rearview mirror; it was there for the taking, for the mining.
Carrie Brownstein
#100. I think grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it's feeling. You're not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.
Carrie Brownstein
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