Top 100 Lena Dunham Quotes
#1. It's interesting how we often can't see the ways in which we are being strong - like, you can't be aware of what you're doing that's tough and brave at the time that you're doing it because if you knew that it was brave, then you'd be scared.
Lena Dunham
#2. None of my actions have ever sort of been motored by the search for a husband or wondering if I was going to have a family someday or wanting to live in a really great house or thinking it would be really great to have a diamond.
Lena Dunham
#3. Over time, my belief in many things has wavered: marriage, the afterlife, Woody Allen.
Lena Dunham
#4. If a young woman is looking at the landscape of Hollywood, what she sees is almost only challenges.
Lena Dunham
#5. Sometimes I was so bored that I started arguments just to experience the rush of almost losing him.
Lena Dunham
#6. At a brunch potluck, I realize that I do, in fact, hate everybody.
Lena Dunham
#7. Is that a condom?" I asked.
"Yeah, basically", she said.
"But is different than a condom? Like, what do you call the product?"
"A condom.
Lena Dunham
#8. This is our hobby, appropriating meaningful artifacts and displaying them as evidence of who we will never be.
Lena Dunham
#9. I didn't have to wait six years to get my show on the air, worry that someone else had a similar idea, or wait around for notes that took my voice out of the show.
Lena Dunham
#10. It's a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.
Lena Dunham
#12. Respect isn't something you command through intimidation and intellectual bullying. It's something you build through a long life of treating people how you want to be treated
Lena Dunham
#13. I just don't want to be around people who don't hate everything in their life right now.
Lena Dunham
#14. It's interesting to see how other people react to an oversharer.
Lena Dunham
#15. The next day we ate too much In-N-Out Burger and lay in bed beside each other and I cried ostensibly because I'd miss him when I left, but truly I felt dead inside
Lena Dunham
#16. I am grown up. That's why I cooked all this food!
Lena Dunham
#17. I think that people in the phase between being someone's kid and being someone's parent have always been uniquely narcissistic, but that social media and Twitter and LiveJournal make it really easy to navel-gaze in a way that you've never been able to before.
Lena Dunham
#18. Don't put yourself in situations you'd like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself.
Lena Dunham
#19. D. J. Tanner called and she wants her wardrobe back so it can be included in a museum retrospective about the prime years of Full House.
Lena Dunham
#20. I quit acting when I was 11 because I was cast as a bouncing ball in 'Alice in Wonderland,' and I felt slighted and wounded.
Lena Dunham
#21. I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.
Lena Dunham
#22. I find it really awkward to do a scene where I'm supposed to seem like I'm in love.
Lena Dunham
#23. I should do the things that make me feel cool and smart. As I get older, I'm realizing more and more that it doesn't really matter if I'm good at it, it just matters that I try. My own effort, my own willingness, are becoming what's appealing to me.
Lena Dunham
#24. My fears came true: People called me fat and hideous, and I lived. And now I keep living.
Lena Dunham
#25. She has never listened to Deepak Chopra, switched to almond milk, or meditated. Yet she is here, in the chair by the window in the house she was born in, outliving her husband and siblings and nephews and friends.
Lena Dunham
#26. And my mother always knew that, hence her Nikon raised high and pointed right into the mirror. She sensed that by documenting her own body, she was preserving her history. Beautifully. Nakedly. Imperfectly. Her private experiment made way for my public one.
Lena Dunham
#27. She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions.
Lena Dunham
#28. When I graduated college I had a series of just humiliating jobs that I couldn't believe I was at.
Lena Dunham
#29. I've always been someone who feels better, if I see what I'm going through in a movie.
Lena Dunham
#30. I'm not super thin, but I'm thin, for like, Detroit
Lena Dunham
#31. I think breakfast is the one meal when you don't have to eat animal, maybe.
Lena Dunham
#32. But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.
Lena Dunham
#33. Calling someone a drama queen is so negative. Why not 'content creator'?
Lena Dunham
#34. Hugs feel good even when they come from strangers. Ergo, we should all be hugging more.
Lena Dunham
#35. My parents were very supportive when I was growing up and have been all the way through.
Lena Dunham
#36. But I also think when we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other.
Lena Dunham
#37. Mouseburger: unpretty, unspecial, unformed.
Lena Dunham
#38. It would probably be too easy a cop out to say that just Republican males hate me. Though there's a large swath of them, for sure.
Lena Dunham
#39. When it's low-budget, and you have one other person on the set, you have to make rules.
Lena Dunham
#40. My relationship to eating, my relationship to critiquing my own shape, all of that has changed since I've started viewing my body much more as a tool to do my work.
Lena Dunham
#41. Our minifridge had nothing but tres leches cake in it.
Lena Dunham
#42. I went to an amazing school in Brooklyn called St. Anne's that's a really kind of creative hot bed.
Lena Dunham
#43. In Hollywood, you've got a hundred people on set, and shooting the sex scene you're wearing nude-toned underwear and tape on your nipples. Nothing is going beyond where you want it to go.
Lena Dunham
#44. Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying,
Lena Dunham
#45. I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age.
Lena Dunham
#46. Rich, you don't need to fight it. I'm not like, trying to frame you. I am letting you know that it is OK for you to act on this fantasy, because I am gross and so are you.
Lena Dunham
#47. I'd always loved movies, but it wasn't some sort of desperate love of celluloid. It was literally like, "I want to write things, and I want people to see them more."
Lena Dunham
#48. You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.
Lena Dunham
#49. But that's how I felt in high school, sure that my people were from elsewhere, and going elsewhere, and that they would recognise me when they saw me. They would like me enough that it wouldn't matter if I liked myself. They would see the good in me so that I could, too.
Lena Dunham
#50. I especially like it when a guy starts out rude, explains that it's a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder once I get to know him.
Lena Dunham
#51. Family first. Work second. Revenge third.
Lena Dunham
#52. Is what's manifesting as a fear actually some instinct to resist being young? Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it's too late. Is the sense of imminent death bound up in the desire to leave some kind of a legacy?
Lena Dunham
#53. I started writing plays, but the fact that plays don't last forever was too much for me to bear.
Lena Dunham
#54. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren't needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter.
Lena Dunham
#55. Later in the summer your grandfather dies, and you're secretly glad. You have a place to put all your sorrow now, one that people will understand.
Lena Dunham
#56. A picture does not lie. It has the quality of an image taken by a ghost hunter, revealing floaters and spirits that the participants had been unable to see.
Lena Dunham
#57. Even when presented with evidence of my own productivity I think that the people accusing me of being productive don't know how hard it is for me to just bend my elbow sometimes.
Lena Dunham
#58. How could someone who has never lost a parent, a lover, or a best friend have the faintest clue about what any of this means?
Lena Dunham
#59. That is because no one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone's gonna think of to say about me, I've already said to me, about me, probably within the last half hour.
Lena Dunham
#60. I seriously consider television to be the people's medium.
Lena Dunham
#62. I frustrate myself as a writer. There are certain things that I'll think, 'Well, that would be really fun to play ... if somebody else was playing this character.'
Lena Dunham
#63. I love flawed female characters, duking it out.
Lena Dunham
#64. I have never been a physically engaged person. Like, I was not an athletic kid. I was the kid who came up with a thousand excuses not to take a gym class. Even now, if I could, I would do all my work from bed.
Lena Dunham
#65. I can play very annoying girl, very lost girl and then all the things in the spectrum between.
Lena Dunham
#66. What happens over the next few months is like the plot of a children's movie, the kind where a dog finds its owner in spite of insurmountable odds and prohibitive geography.
Lena Dunham
#67. It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.
Lena Dunham
#68. After several interactions in which he questioned my authority and pretended not to hear me speaking, it was clear he was my type
Lena Dunham
#69. That being said, it's horrible when people you hate get things you want.
Lena Dunham
#70. After all, desire is the enemy of contentment.
Lena Dunham
#71. It doesn't occur to so many people that if you don't have a clear heterosexual, gender confirming identity that there are parts of day-to-day life - like using a bathroom or getting your clothes - that just aren't going to be as easy.
Lena Dunham
#72. Why spend $200 once a week on therapy when you can spend $150 once a year on a psychic?
Lena Dunham
#74. You know, I always think of myself as sort of ready for every criticism.
Lena Dunham
#75. You will find," she says, "that there's a certain grace to having your heart broken.
Lena Dunham
#76. I don't really read reviews ... That's not where my attention goes.
Lena Dunham
#77. When she writes, which isn't often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known.
Lena Dunham
#78. I always thought that if you had any real proximity to famous people, that your obsession with famous people, would wane is some way. Like, I wouldn't want to deep google Matthew McConaughey's early relationships for hours before I go to bed. And it's just gotten worse.
Lena Dunham
#79. I always reminded myself that this wasn't exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren't they?
Lena Dunham
#80. There's always an article coming out, saying, 'The new thing is funny women!'
Lena Dunham
#81. When my sister was born, family legend has it that I asked my mother if we could reverse roles: "Let's tell her I'm her mother and you're her sister. She won't ever know!" Over
Lena Dunham
#82. None of the pants ever fit me, unless I head into the Maternity section, so I buy mostly sacklike dresses and Cosby sweaters.
Lena Dunham
#83. I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.
Lena Dunham
#84. Scandal has made wine and popcorn seem like a viable, even healthful, meal.
Lena Dunham
#86. For me, my life goal is to be in a position where I can wear pajamas 24 hours a day. That's what makes me happy.
Lena Dunham
#87. I guess I think about doing stuff that nobody else has done.
Lena Dunham
#88. It's become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I'll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology.
Lena Dunham
#89. Part of being a feminist is giving other women the freedom to make choices you might not necessarily make yourself.
Lena Dunham
#90. I just hope that I continue to keep a line between my private life and who I play, even if they are closely intertwined, and so I'm careful. I don't even know where my line is, but I know I have a line.
Lena Dunham
#91. My sister is bold, independent, and not afraid to wear overalls. Some of her first words as a child were "that's not fair," and she's been committed to social justice ever since. She's my hero.
Lena Dunham
#92. Confidence lets you pull anything off, even Tevas with socks
Lena Dunham
#93. I learned that people are much more game to mock their own personas than you would think.
Lena Dunham
#94. It is really funny how even cool chicks are sort of like, 'Our moms covered that feminism thing and now we're living in a post-that world,' when that just isn't true.
Lena Dunham
#95. The work that's interesting to me in other people is really confessional.
Lena Dunham
#96. And I decided then that I will never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won't be threatened by the old, or by the new. I'll open wide like a daisy every morning. I will make my work.
Lena Dunham
#97. Each corner is a memory. In that way, it's just like every town.
Lena Dunham
#98. I can't find a goddamn fucking job and I'm too fat to be a stripper, I said as I polished off a stale croissant.
Lena Dunham
#99. I think that it's very important to be with someone who makes you feel like the best version of yourself. In some sense, your partner is a mirror, and you have to like what they're reflecting back at you.
Lena Dunham
#100. I felt highly anxious in a way that I didn't think other children were.
Lena Dunham
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